01 Apr Ones to Watch: Diana Tremaine

When Diana Tremaine paints geese it makes us feel like part of the sky, gives us the urge to rise, to maybe, just maybe, cut through a cloud and find our way home. Her paintings are not merely representations of geese, swan or horses, instead they are responses to the natural world. The sky is full of obstacles, potential impediments, but the blueness of the infinite pushes us on.

She does this by leaving traces of her journey throughout the painting. The dangers of flying are supplanted by our own subconscious fears, which come across through the history of her paint. These open areas, small glimpses into her process, expose the emotional underpainting, and reveal the original intent of her work.

“I use a palette knife or a squeegee to pull the paint through itself to create an atmospheric space, to integrate the literal and the non-literal,” she says. “I leave some of the very first brushstrokes so there are always holes that go back to the beginning of the painting. The energy I felt when I started the painting. It allows the brushstrokes to stay with me, which contain a tremendous amount of psychological content in a way that holds equal importance to me — and maybe more — than the actual subject.”

She wants the layering process to remain part of the painting, starting with a neutral ground, with every new layer Tremaine leaves a bit of the prior stratum showing.

“I find paint compelling, the way it sits on the canvas and on top of itself,” she says. “It’s just beautiful to me.

When you have opaque paint sitting on top of transparent paint it creates tremendous depth of field. It creates one plane (of existence) that sits on top of another plane.”

Those little areas of unexpected depths that happen in an opening of the surface inside the image, allow the viewer to go deeper into the painting, enhancing our experience with her work.

Diana Tremaine is represented by the Gallatin River Gallery, Big Sky, Montana, and Two Moon Gallery, Nashville, Tennessee.