Diane O’Dwyer is a contemporary artist who was born in the UK in 1950 and moved with her family to Adelaide, South Australia when she was a young child. She has lived on the Balmain peninsula in Sydney since 1972, and currently works in the One Plus 2 Studios in Lilyfield. Diane studied at the Sydney Gallery School of Fine Arts from 2002-2006, with further mentoring from Elisabeth Cummings, abstract painter and printer; and Jo Bertini, expedition artist, from 2010-2013. She has exhibited in NSW galleries since 2004 and her work is represented in private collections in Sydney and Scotland.
More about the artist can be found on her website www.easelpeg.com.au
a personal letter of the artist about this project in the Netherlands painting two months in a residece in Renkum, that ended up with an exhibition at gallery Arps&Co in Amsterdam, entitled FIRST IMPRESSIONS
" My artistic career is about putting together my philosophical values, and living the life through art expression. Of course I shall always be seeking and my ideas will keep evolving. I think when I get back to the studio in Australia there will be much reflection.
I felt that I had been tipped on my head when I arrived at the Renkum Residency OBRAS and had to work through my confusion, and accept just what would come out of the end of the brush, working scared and nervously. What a difference in culture : Renum and Sidney.
The Blue Houses was my first painting. I needed to paint thinly for drying purposes, and I responded to rising sea levels as a global issue. I love using colour so Red Houses was inspired by a piece of bark off a local tree, it was bright red, yellow and orange, so I used it as the basis for a landscape. A couple of days later the bark lost it's colour. The painting just grew, the turmoil of global disaster cruelly affecting the animals too. So it would seem that there is a relationship.
Then the heat of spring came along, and the buzz of insects came into my studio and I began to study them closely. The bee seemed to be prominent and I started to seek out other insects and realise their importance to our environment. Some works have not been included as I unwisely painted them on boards, too heavy to manage travelling etc., I did sit one day on the Rhine River, and in my solitude was able to reflect on the engineering of the waterways, and how the Dutch people care very much about encouraging nature back for all people to enjoy. My paint styles varied somewhat in my search for expression and choice of supports and mediums, all the normal challenges for a painter, except the limitations of not having my own stuff. I love to be experimental with oil paint like mixing big batches of oil paint and pouring, seeing what it does in it's movement. Of course there were limitations, but hell when in a pub one can use cigarette ash and beer to do a sketch, not what you would call archival, ha ha."
