ARTIST STATEMENT
I am Astrid Dahl, an Australian artist. My art study began in RMIT Australia when I was 16, and ended with a masters of art. I constantly experiment and with 60 years of painting and teaching art I feel that I am still evolving, still learning and still in wonderment with Nature's ‘Treasures’.
It is in the act of creating itself which is the most exciting to me.
My main focus is the landscape – not in the literal or photographic sense but its poetry, its spirituality, its philosophy and its distilled abstractedness'. I process, discover and redefine my life through interpretations of the land – the Mother – my beginning and my ultimate end.
Travelling through Tibet, the Thar Desert India, The Great Sandy Desert and the Gibson Desert in Western Australia and the Black Rock desert in Nevada, USA, gives me the inspiration for my work. I collect fragments, such as stones rocks, and bottling different coloured sands, sketching and use my own photography to further enrich my paintings..
In the 80s when I saw for the first time, the brick red earth, the clear azure blue sky and the sparse desert growth struggling to survive. I fell in love with the remote rawness and saw an analogy to my own life at the time. I have kept my connections with the desert country always gathering inspiration for more works.
I think we all live in a desert and we try to populate it with our hopes and dreams, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. Everyone’s desert is different, sometime not of our own choosing.
Lately I have been wandering down the road of painting Still-life and Flowers. I have a strange calm when I paint flora and enjoy it immensely. As Buddha once said, “you can see the world in a single Flower”.
The materials I use, varies with each painting and I see-saw between semi abstractness and some semblance of recognition. I enjoy making each piece unique in its concept and approach. I use acrylics and combine it with oils and a variety of textures and mediums. I sometimes add gold or silver leaf, which is like painting with light. Each painting is on canvas, stretched on a wooden frame and varnished with an artist quality satin finish. All materials I use are of Artist quality.