Featured Artist Diane Walker

Artist Diane Walker presents a collection of abstract paintings in her distinctive intuitive style, influenced by meditative practice. Discover more of her work on her website.

 

 

One of the first lessons I learned from my artist mom was that I couldn’t draw, so I spent most of my working life as a writer. In my last job before I became a full-time mom I was responsible for a monthly newspaper. I took some photography classes so I could do a better job of illustrating the articles I was publishing.

 

 

When I left that job I moved with my daughters to a tiny island in the Pacific Northwest to get a better school situation for them. I took a camera with me and started taking pictures—driftwood, boats, sunsets, and island life.

 

 

It turned out I was good at it. My photos sold well in galleries, so I spent the next 20 years shooting the relentless beauty of life in the islands of the Pacific Northwest. But in 2012 I saw an artist give a demo in which he created abstract paintings that looked remarkably like the photographs I was shooting. It looked like so much fun that I called and asked if he gave classes. He did, so I signed up.

 

 

I went twice to his wonderful garage studio, but the inner voices telling me I couldn’t draw kept getting in the way. After I ended both classes in tears, he suggested I might do better working on my own. So I went home, turned my now college-age daughter’s room into an art studio, and began painting. My first painting sold! From then on I was hooked.

 

 

I quickly learned that whenever I tried to plan a painting the results were disappointing. So I learned to just dip my brush in a few favorite colors, and start swirling them over the canvas. Once some color had been applied, I would then respond to whatever seemed to be emerging, using various techniques picked up along the way from online classes I was taking.

 

 

And what would evolve as I continued applying paint to the canvas always seemed to reflect a mix of influences: the water view outside my studio window, the events currently dominating world news, my meditation practice—which tends to add a calming influence to all my work, and whatever stories my writer brain would tell me about what seemed to be appearing.

 

 

Having spent all those years photographing on the shores of the Pacific Northwest, it’s not surprising that many of my paintings tend to stay in a sort of Northwestern color range—blues, teals, and greens, often surrounded with the paleness of our cloudy skies, but punctuated with touches of brighter colors to enliven the scenes.

 

 

World events frequently creep in—wildfires, storms, wars, and even political events have been known to radically alter both the colors and styles of my work. So it’s always fun to see what will happen when I embark on a new piece.

 

Diane Walker invites you to follow on Instagram.

 

 

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