In the decades since, I've focused on the natural world, beautiful as well as distressed, as everything tells a story. ·
Dana
Christensen
Original Fine Art Catalog
Available Artwork
“Dana Christensen is a Sausalito artist who moves between oil painting, mixed media and historic photographic processes. Her landscapes and nature studies, from Acadia to Hokkaido, use a photographer's feel for light to show the natural world, beautiful as well as distressed.”
— Dana Christensen
The Process
Inside the Studio
The Painting Process
Dana's process starts with what she learned as a photographer: how light falls, how darks hold a picture together, and how a simple contrast can carry a story. For years she printed her images by hand with historic processes, photogravure, platinum/palladium and cyanotype, and hand colored monochrome prints. Each of these slow techniques gives soft, deep tones that suit images about time and the impermanence of the natural world. From there her work became more physical. She prints or transfers photographs onto unusual surfaces such as silk and vellum, then works into them with paint and pastel and adds gold and palladium leaf, so the piece gains depth, dimension and a quiet glow. Works like Waterlilies on Silk, Quietude on Silk and Iceland Night on Silk come from this way of working, as do the Altered Images series of plants and found forms. In her paintings she uses oil in transparent layers, building color slowly so that impressions and memories of a place, a road in Acadia, a stretch of coast, a desert storm, turn into expressive landscapes. Some pieces mix oil with paper or other media, and she also makes monotypes. Whatever the medium, the aim stays the same: to interpret time and place with emotional depth while keeping a photographer's sensitivity to light and space.
