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ARTS&LEISURE
176
July14
In her upcoming retrospective,
Astrid Dahl:
Looking Back
and Look For wa r d – A
Retrospective Art Exhibition
,
Singapore-based artist ASTRID
DAHL will feature paintings from
her entire career, covering a
vast variety of expressions and
terrains – from dry Australian
deserts, tropical Thai rainforests
and Tibetan hills to seascapes
and outer space. We asked
Astrid to share some of the
inspirations behind her works,
both past and present.
How would you describe your
artistic style and creative process?
My works are scattered poetic versions
of my experience of the landscape.
They’re representations, or fragments, of
memorised parts of earth, sky and water.
The themes are pieced together in my
mind like a mosaic, and they become
a reality to me as I paint. Each piece is
unique, and reflective of my immediate
experience or mood, or a memory that’s
been recalled.
At times, I have overlaid the “life force”,
the visible and the invisible, using lines and
textured shapes among other techniques.
Right now, I’m using a lot of gold and
silver leaf, combinedwith oil paint. I love to
experiment, and often do small canvases
K
nown for her colourful,
contemporary landscape
paintings, Astrid has been
expressing herself creatively
since she was a young girl – at four,
she’d use the pigment from crushed
flowers for drawing and, at 19, she
sold her first painting. Her fascination
with landscapes began when she
first crossed the Nullarbor Plain from
Melbourne to Perth in 1980 – sparking
a series of works and giving her endless
inspiration. In her new exhibition,
Astrid – who was born in Thailand to
a Norwegian father and an English-
Thai mother, and raised in Singapore,
Malaysia and Australia – will showcase
works that span more than 45 years.
A Life in Landscapes
By Amy Greenburg
Clockwise
from left:
Networking:
Mixed media
on canvas.
A Walk in the
Park:
Mixed
media with
acrylics. "This
painting is
one of my
more recent
works, tending
more toward
abstraction.
I’m now more
comfortable
with the
‘inferred’ rather
than just what
I see, though
what I see is
still the starting
point.”
Goddess of
Water, Land
and Sky:
Mixed media
with gold leaf
and Chinese
characters.
Traces in the
Sand:
Mixed
media on
canvas. “This is
a symphony of
textures found
on the desert
floor.”