ARTIST INFORMATION

Louise Yeandle Diver

I was born in Winchester, England in 1980. I studied at Winchester College of Art (Foundation Art and Design), Arts Institute at Bournemouth (BA Hons Fine Art) and Wimbledon College of Art, part of the University of the Arts London (MA Fine Art: Painting).

I currently live and work in London and participate in various group and solo exhibitions.

My painting uses landscape as subject matter and explores concepts of wonder and the sublime.

Literature has a large bearing on my work. El-ahrairah: Prince with One-thousand Enemies and Rabbits took the novel Watership Down as a starting point with which to explore terrifying, disquieting landscapes that manifested into something else.

The Isle of the Dead series were loosely based on the myths and stories about the river Styx and the Island of Dead, referred to in Christian, Greek and Pagan mythology. These paintings were however about creating an otherworldly place, somewhere that could exist on our planet, but which has not yet been discovered; about my desire to explore the unknown.

My recent work deals with the aesthetics of rare experience, particularly the concepts of wonder and the sublime and references historic landscape paintings, such as those by Casper David Friedrich. I am interested in how imagery can be borrowed from these paintings and reinterpreted for the contemporary viewer utilising colour, humour and subject matter. Rather than trying to recreate the sublime in my work, I attempt to imbue the paintings with a sense of wonder.

These paintings represent my desire for escape, for exploration of the unknown and the discoveries waiting to be made.

Tarjei Vesaas’ novel The Ice Palace has been a significant influence on this collection of work. Vesaas writes of a schoolgirl hiding inside a frozen waterfall while playing truant, vividly describing the details of her visit and eventual demise. Vesaas’ language fantastically illustrates the notions of wonder and the sublime, invoked in both the book’s doomed protagonist and the reader.

Fluorescent colours in my paintings shout: “look at me”; they render the landscapes less beautiful, less organic and less familiar. These colours were designed to standout, but in contemporary (urban) society they are so ubiquitous we often don’t notice them. By removing these colours from their conventional contemporary environment they seem more striking – they serve to arouse discomfort, even hurting the viewer’s eyes.

This is the wonder – the excitement of the strange – that I am looking to create with my paintings.

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