We love the way that Diane uses recollection and imagination to generate scenery within her paintings.
Inspired from her own experiences of nature – whether it is the allotment behind her house in London, the flowers in the Swiss Alps where she grew up, cycling along the Regent’s Canal, or Ophelia among the Flowers by Odilon Redon – she uses the memories and sensations they engender to paint her own, highly sensory fields and forests. Poppies, edelweiss, sunflowers, daisies or dandelions may be recognisable in her paintings, but overall the scenery she depicts is non-specific.
Hers is a conscious disconnection from the highly digitised world around us. Diane’s paintings draw attention to the relevance of depicting nature as a raw, sensory experience, in contrast to our society of consumerism, technology and ecological distress. These are places of unsullied purity. She does not rely on technological devices (photographs or external visual source material) but draws on her own lived experiences. Diane says of her work, “Painting is for me a way to layer time and simultaneously to transcend it.”
