Diane Van Noord
BoldBrush Recommends: Diane Van Noord
Biography
If you were to ask Diane Van Noord what she loves most about painting, her answer would be quite simple. She would say it is the paint.
Her paintings are reflections of her heart, and luscious, beautiful paint is at the heart of her work.
From the first colors mixed on her palette to the last stroke of her palette knife on each painting, the beauty of the paint is like a silent voice that tells a wordless story about her creative passions as much as a scene or subject she is painting.
Diane paints in oils primarily with palette knives, which she discovered many years ago to be the perfect painting tool for her. Having painted with watercolors for ten years when she started painting, she began to feel a need to paint with a different medium to give a greater depth of expression and personal meaning to her paintings. She tried acrylics, mixed media, and pastels, but the greatest satisfaction came when she worked with oils.
"I have a light touch with my painting tools, and I am also a very messy painter. When I started painting in oils with brushes, I was so frustrated with all the mess, I found that mixing the colors with palette knives suited me very well. Then I started using just the palette knife to paint. And so began my new journey."
From the time Diane was a young child she loved being outdoors. Climbing up to sit in the backyard apple tree, especially when it was blossoming in early spring, or sitting on a low limb of the large beechwood tree in the nearby woods were two quiet places where she could observe the natural world. Her love of the landscape as a special place with its colors, shapes, textures and beauty is rooted in her childhood experiences outdoors.
Diane's artistic nature was recognized early in her life by those who knew her well and she was encouraged in her creativity by family. She wanted to go to art school after graduating from high school, but family circumstances did not allow that happen. Diane was able to go to college after working for a year and for two years she studied color and interior design.
After marriage and having her three children, she returned to college part time to continue her education, finishing with a degree in Religion and Studio Art. With children at home, her primary vocation remained as a stay at home mom where she would paint while her children where in school.
Workshops with professional artists such as William Hook, William Herring, Christopher Schink, Kenn Backhaus, George Strickland, Ron Rencher, and Matt Smith during those years brought new experiences, learning, and challenges to her painting. Combined with personally inspirational influences from the works of Edgar Payne, Georgia O'Keefe, Gregory Kondos, Jeanne Dobie, Peter Wileman, and Brian Rutenberg, through their individual painting styles, use of color, dynamic shapes, and pleasant subject matter, her own distinctive painting style has developed.
"I absolutely love beautiful color and color harmony. Paint colors are so glorious, and to let them be a pure part of the composition and expression in my paintings is an important consideration in how I compose my paintings."
A few years ago, Diane began experimenting by adding cold wax medium and mixed media materials such as beach sand to her oil paints and using texturing tools. The varied surface textures she could create with these materials and the use of texturing tools opened the door for her to interpret and paint landscapes in a slightly abstracted way, adding a more contemporary dimension to her paintings .
"I love for there to be a feeling of movement through my landscapes. By layering the paint in a certain manner, and at the end using texturing tools to expose some of the underlying paint, a sense of movement brings a contemporary feel and rhythm to the work."
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