Diane Bedser
Artists Statement
‘Diane sees her process as a conversation with the canvas and it is only when all these elements, her colour, form, surface, and line have harmonised that the painting’s content reveals itself.’
Diane Bedser’s paintings are abstracted experiences of things noticed in the world around her. They are about colour, about movement, about energy, about essence. Diane absorbs social interactions, crumbling walls, the shadows cast by buildings or trees. The artist allows these visual interactions and thoughts to wash over her, bringing them back to her studio to disgorge them thoughtfully on her canvas. She explains that she doesn’t often know what she is trying to communicate until the work is finished, until the paint has articulated it to her.
This way of rearticulating the world around Diane has come from her experience as a contemporary dance choreographer. The artist would take a stimulus: a painting, an artifact, or a piece of music and abstract the movement from the object, internalising its essence before exploring the movements, pathways, and relationships with dancers, in order to metamorphise it into dance.
She has readapted this process for painting. Diane is highly attuned to the abstracted forms or movement divined from a scene, moment, or object, stating: ‘It’s like observing a person’s body language. You pick up certain things from a wordless interaction, generating a certain feeling or empathy.’ Therefore, the marks, the colour, the composition of her paintings all combine and interact to characterise that which she has absorbed externally.
Diane is passionate about colour. Her choice of pigments is intuitive, functioning as an extension of her abstraction of moments and interactions. The artist uses colours not only to draw the eye but to form relationships between shape and line. As in a dance performance, the colours play the role of costumes, scenery, and lighting, setting the mood of the painting, becoming the key element which brings the piece together: the star of the show.
She will often delight and luxuriate in mixing a palette, before changing it entirely on the canvas once the painting starts to articulate itself. For Diane sees her process as a conversation with the canvas and it is only when all these elements, her colour, form, surface, and line have harmonised that the painting’s content reveals itself. What the painting communicates is often personal revelations about Diane herself: ‘it’s a two-way relationship. It tells me something about who I am.’
For more information: https://dianebedser.co.uk