Dinah Dixon
Tell us a little bit about yourself?
I live in Brisbane with my hubby, two teenage girls and pooch who makes a great Studio companion. Growing up in country Queensland, I had an early appreciation for nature, getting outdoors and enjoying the land. Nowadays, I love to travel and get out in nature as often as I can. I find it quite therapeutic. I’m particularly drawn to the natural beauty of life and of the landscape, it's shape and form and the warmth of the colours that the light reflects onto the foliage and water at different times of the day catches my eye.
What is your favourite drink?
Most days start with a little exercise and a coffee before I get the kids off to school. I am also partial to an icy cold champers or a smooth red on the weekends. One of my favourite things to do is crank up the music with a glass of Red on a Friday night and go wild and unhindered with the brushstrokes of a new underpainting…some of my best work!
What inspired you to start painting?
After my second child was born in 2007, I decided that it might be fun to do a drawing class as some me-time to have that hour out of the house once a week. After the first class of wonky wine glasses, I thought maybe this isn’t for me, but I persisted, probably because I was desperate for that hour to myself and then realised that drawing was really quite mathematical, joining ellipses and forming a wine glass or a human form. Drawing became painting, which later became a half day painting Still Life and Landscapes in Oils and Acrylics where I learnt about colour mixing from a limited palette. For the first time I was seeing Cadmium & lemon yellows and Cerulean and Ultramarine blues in the leaves of the trees on the drive home and it opened up a whole new world for me in the way I see colour. I continued painting part-time for several years, entering the odd group exhibition and in the last couple of years I have finally been able to devote more time to painting regularly and have setup a website to sell my art online -www.dinahdixon.com
What advice would you give other artists/creatives starting out?
I would say ‘Start where you are, with what you have and just keep showing up’. Don’t overthink it. Waiting for blocks of time to magically appear inevitably doesn’t happen, so just paint consistently as much and as often as you can and enjoy the process.
You can read more about Dinah Dixon here.