Texts about Diana

Diana Copperwhite:  How things stand, at this very moment

Chris Clarke © 2019

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…

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Diana Copperwhite: Signal to Noise

Stephen Maine reviews Diana Copperwhite: Depend on the Morning Sun at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel,New York, on view through January 28, 2017.

Maine writes: “Copperwhite has hit upon a crazily recognizable way of applying paint that both updates (somewhat tongue-in-cheekily) the concept of the “autographic mark” so prized by the analysts of Abstract Expressionism, and simultaneously taps into a leitmotif of contemporary, computer-inflected visuality, the color gradient.”

Read review at Hyperallercic


Diana Copperwhite: Interview

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.”

Read full interview at Two Coats of Paint


World is Suddener Than we Fancy it

Ingrid Lyons © 2015 (website)

Paint is dragged, daubed, pulled and pushed across the canvas. Often the materials strain to veil the surface and activity from layers beneath begin to permeate. There are intervals of fluidity where one layer completely obscures the history of preceding layers, rendering them illegible. A prevailing murkiness is counteracted by rifts of color that announce  themselves in a staccato like manner, starting and stopping, echoing though apparently disparate and disconnected.

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Diana Copperwhite: Chance as Choice

Written by: Colm Toibin

The studio is a cluttered room in Temple Bar Studios; the noise and chatter from the square and the street below seem oddly part of the small universe which Diana Copperwhite has created in this space. She allows the world into her paintings in ways which are at times muffled and subtle and covered over, subsumed into the image, made part of a surface which is capable of immense expression…

Read more…Diana Copperwhite –Chance as Choice


Diana Copperwhite

Written by: Skye Sherwin

A crowd scene. The mood is urgent. Figures blur, faces dissolve. Amid the throng you see two people that you think you know. The woman’s white pillbox hat, her partner’s straight black tie, the black lines of ‘Buddy Holly’ style spectacle frames: it could be the Kennedy’s, but the image refuses to completely resolve itself into that decisive moment of recognition. A figure turns a pair of binoculars upwards. Another points to the sky behind: its blue confused by energetic streaks of fleshy, fiery pink. Two circles dominate this backdrop: one filled with a burnt orange and a crescent of green, muted like the colours of memory, of the past, the other no more than a hollow, linear echo of its brother. Though recalling any number of photographs documenting the 1960s golden couple, in Diana Copperwhite’s Inner Space of and Outer Thought (2008) they are located in a domain particular to contemporary artists: faced with a history full of holes, the vagaries of interpretation, and the question of what to represent in a world overrun with images.

Read more…Diana Copperwhite text – Skye Sherwin