Texts about Diana

Diana Copperwhite:  How things stand, at this very moment

In Diana Copperwhite’s exhibition Proto Fiction and the Sleep of Reason, her paintings appear to pulse, glow, dissolve, vibrate, radiate, to fade in and out of focus even as you look at them. Layers of scuffed, scraped and smeared colour partially obscure any underlying images or suggestions of recognisable subject matter. You, just briefly, see something there, a hint of the familiar, before it disappears again – and even the memory of its vision dissipates in turn. Copperwhite is adept at implicating the spectator in her artistic process, as she registers and records the intangible and the imperceptible: radio waves, infrared light, a change in atmosphere, impinging external distractions, flights of memory or free association. These ephemeral, evanescent elements all come together in the canvas, even if only momentarily before being buried within subsequent gestures.

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Diana Copperwhite’s Paintings: Reality, Virtual Reality, and Abstraction

Gail Levin © 2016

Diana Copperwhite makes big bold oil paintings that excite and stir our twenty-first-century perceptions. Her compelling images are both complex and energetic. She is never at a loss for the impulse to paint, though she is coy about revealing her concerns, often throwing the viewer just a few clues and leaving a lot of room for the imagination.  She creates an exquisite tension between abstraction and figuration or representation of any kind. She appears to tease out this tension to hold our interest, as we both take in the visual splendor of her paintings and try to fathom what they are about…

Helen O’Leary interviews painter Diana Copperwhite on the occasion of her show A Million and One Things Under the Sun at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, on view through April 25, 2015.

Copperwhite comments: “I love the large scale of paintings, they make me feel like a director of my own movie. Its also a way of creating forms that release and contract, so different languages can co exist in the one space. I create chaos and then tidy it all up again, but I don’t just work on a large scale. Its more about how one piece reacts with another creating a conversation so they all become part of a system. I see the small ones as punctuation in a sentence but the sentence is visual, sonic and to some degree graphic…. I set out to make flat paintings, but the structure keeps coming back in, insisting on carving out a reliable place. In this reliability the colour reemerges to dominate and creates free flowing forms that for me are the unseen world, which relies on lenses to become apparent.”