Dianne Webb
Houston, TX
Artist's Statement:
I paint from a concept, often not of a thing or tangible object, but rather of an idea or emotion. My interest is in the experience of creation between a work and myself as artist as well as with the response to a piece from someone viewing or otherwise interacting with it. I am currently working on three series, Emergence, Formations, and Shattered.
In my first series Emergence, I capture the idea of moving out of or into a space, an idea, or a way of making meaning beyond what we presently occupy. I paint the idea of known and unknown, embedded meaning and disequilibrium, of moving from the static to the dynamic.
In the evolving series, Formations I abstract the natural composition of rocks collected off the Irish coastline, California rivers, and the coast of Maine. On canvas, I use oils, brush, and palate knife to suggest the surrealistic colors, shapes, and patterns in the stones.
In Shattered, I work with broken glass— single broken panes or layered and smashed—the patterns of the breaks and the planes they leave behind. This idea of something we perceive as whole and then shattered—what new ideas, shapes, meanings can be found there—is the focus of this work.
Technically, I paint in oils on canvas, applying pigments with brushes and palette knife, sometimes using rice paper or gesso to build texture or depth. Colors are mixed on a palette or directly on the piece. I work from the mind’s eye to the canvas—each piece wholly constructed there—at times I work furiously with a clear intention, at other times I move slowly into the piece with a vague idea—working what is known, backing off and studying it, then finally moving on when the previous phase is realized.
Artist's Bio:
Dianne Webb is an abstract expressionist oil painter who has been involved in visual, folk, and performing arts for over twenty years. Over the past decade, through her work, primarily with adolescents, as writing teacher, art teacher, and theater director, she has been immersed in the ideas of meaning-making, of the emergence of identity, and the vast diversity of the human soul. She has considered the journeys of youth into adulthood and of the movement of adults through their own dynamic growth—noticing often the opportunities that allow change to erupt, evolve, and take hold. Over the last two years she has created a three series of oil paintings called, Emergence, Shattered, and Formations.
Her art education has primarily been self-taught, growing up with an oil painter for a mother. Since her own adolescence, she has studied how varied artists have applied paint to canvas at the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay, MOMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, MFA Boston, MFAH, Menil Collection, Portland Museum of Art, and at various other museums around the country.
She was born in Maine, and is the middle generation of three generations of visual artists. She has a BA/BS in the Behavior Sciences and is currently working on an MFA. She presently writes and paints in her studio in Houston, Texas.
