Surprise
“Portraiture of a kind, though more about substance than likeness. The human as accidental, biological, random.”
Dianne Kaufman
Falling Man
“De Kooning said that flesh is what oils were invented for. Paint can glisten and seep, blob, and wrinkle, shine, sag, drip and weep. Paint can.”
Dianne Kaufman
Standing Figure 2021
“The accidental marks that happen during the making, seem to me to have some resonance with those elements of chance in birth and life that go to shape an individual.”
Dianne Kaufman
Charcoal Dancer 1
“I fell in love with the operatic absurdity I saw in the work of Francis Bacon.”
Dianne Kaufman
Sleeper Watercolour
“When I began to paint I thought I wanted to speak about being human in some way. Now I’m not sure if I’m painting about paint. The two seem to collide.”
Dianne Kaufman
Dr Justine Hopkins
CHANGING NOT FADING:
The paintings of Dianne Kaufman
Dianne Kaufman believes in paint. What it can do, physically, washed across or thickly impasted on to canvas, and what it can mean, pushing us beyond the physical into metaphysics and metaphor. Her paintings confound expectation and challenge definition; they are heads without faces, where features shift and vanish under surfaces encrusted with webbed networks of wrinkles like reefs of exotic coral or the exposed lobes of the brain. If these are portraits they are skewed ones; portraits of no-one and that is the point: being of no one person they are, at the same time, portraits of every person – of what rather than who we are – the universal rather than the particular. They are timeless; like the ancient bodies dredged from peat-bogs they emerge from their dark backgrounds squinting into the light of a world they did not see made and could never have imagined.