Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery is extremely pleased to announce that Diane Walker has been named as the Gallery’s new featured artist and she will now be promoted by the gallery for the next 14 days in the gallery’s Artist Showcase.
Diane is an award-winning artist and photographer based in Washington, USA. She was selected as 1 of the top twelve finalists in the gallery’s 30th Solo Art Exhibition Series. The placement in this competition qualified her work to be showcased in this feature.
Her Artist Showcase feature will be promoted to hundreds of major news outlets. In addition, the gallery will also be featuring and promoting her artwork in the gallery’s various social media networks for further exposure.
Below are Diane’s Artist Biography, Artist Statement and 5 of her acrylic abstract paintings submitted to this competition.
After 20 years as a professional photographer, Diane Walker began studying abstract painting with Christopher Mathie. She took additional courses with a variety of artists, including Louise Fletcher, Kasia Kresika, Jane Davies and Cat Tesla, and — because she lives on the shores of the Pacific Northwest —became fascinated with the artists of St. Ives and particularly David Mankin’s abstract seascapes.
Combining insights from her daily contemplative practice with her love of the sea and her broadening awareness of artistic media, Diane approaches her time in the studio as an opportunity not only to experiment with color, form, and line, but also to create an immersive sense of the fluidity and drama of the sea along with its underlying stillness.
Working primarily in acrylics, she creates atmospheric, meditative work that is rooted in stillness and invites viewers into a contemplative space — open, calming, and quietly alive with sparks of inspiration to inspire the imagination.
A member of Women Painters of Washington and the Port Ludlow Art League, Diane regularly displays her award-winning work in galleries, hospitals, and festivals around Washington State.
For me the most intriguing creative challenges in life, at work, and in art have always been about reconciling opposites: finding the common ground beneath obvious differences and unearthing the potential for unity that lies hidden in diversity.
As an abstract painter I work to accomplish those objectives, first by working with the opposite shades of blue and orange, and then by balancing dark and light, form and space, movement and stillness. I use a mix of broad house paint brushes and delicate calligraphy brushes, responding to what evolves on the canvas, and the end result, though unplanned, often tends to reflect the quiet undulations of sea and sky that are such an integral part of my life on the coast of the Pacific Northwest.
My hope is that in balancing opposites in a serene context I may bring forth artistry that not only pleases the eye but also awakens a more open and creative response in my viewers, allowing them to imagine a world where dreams and reality can co-exist in peaceful harmony.
What delights me as an artist is to dance in that thin space between the formless and form; to drift from individual to universal and back again; to trace the interaction between our collective understanding of the world and my own unique experience of what pleases or inspires.
Which means that, for me, a painting succeeds if it is neither fully representational nor completely abstract, but calls the viewer into some other healing space where we can both make and safely explore our assumptions about what we see.
To learn more about Diane and to see more of her digital photographs, please visit her website.
Click the Thumbnail to See the Artwork in a Lightbox
