Dina Southwell
Dina Southwell graduated from the Slade School of Art in the 1980s and has worked as an artist, teacher and tour guide ever since. She works from her studio in north Essex, overlooking the River Stour.
She works in all mediums, acrylic, watercolour, pastel and oil, building up layers along the way to reach the final artwork, and finding that each of them helps push the idea along. She returns to places she knows again and again, treating them each time with a new set of colours and light. Her paintings, collages, silkscreens and sketches take in Walton Backwaters and Landermere on the Essex coast, the Solent, Nantucket, Prague, Venice, Valencia and the Stockholm archipelago.
Alongside her own practice she teaches weekly classes from the studio and over Zoom, and runs art retreats abroad.
Artist Statement
Constantly experimenting and finding moments in time that are worth painting and painting them.
My work aims to capture memories of places I have visited and memorable experiences I have lived. By capturing the feeling produced by the colour, light and space of a place rather than what it actually looked like.
I like to think how the landscape I'm creating will appeal to someone who has never seen that landscape. So to get to the abstract work, I have to go through figurative layers.
I sketch on site, take lots of photos and then when I'm back in the studio I use those along with my memory to synthesise a painting using everything I've gathered to build it up. There are a number of processes that I go through before coming to the final artwork. Sometimes, I hold the images in my head for quite a while. And then I push the idea along by going into different mediums, whether that's sketches on paper, ipad, watercolour, acrylic, oil or collage.
I often do abstract and figurative workings of the same subject. I like to go back to subjects and places again and again, constantly experimenting and trying to find new ways of expressing the core of the memory or the landscape.