a little about me …

A reluctant “Artist Statement” by Diana Shearer

My love of creating art began when I was 11 years old. I had to create a poster to hold as I gave an oral report in front of my entire 6th grade class. Through this horrifying experience I discovered two things …. I hate public speaking, and I love creating art, and art has been a constant in my life since that moment. I am thankful to God every single day that He brought art into my life!!!

By the time I was in Junior High, I was a doing colored pencil artwork duplications of LPs covers and selling them to friends (making just enough money to buy more LPs….one of my childhood passions)

I spent many years as a colored pencil portrait artist, but eventually began to work in acrylics, watercolors, fabric, collage, sculpture, and even spent a few years as a mural painter.

For the last few years I’ve mainly been a mixed media artist incorporating watercolor, ink, and sometimes colored pencil. My current trend is to combine watercolor as a background with stippling in ink as the top layer. I use very small tipped technical pens, and I love the affect I can get in stippling these very tiny dots onto the work.

These days 90% of my work is some type of portraiture. I am moved and inspired by faces and the story they have to tell. Many times the subject in the piece isn’t an actual person, but a combination of different faces I have seen or have been moved by.

In the past I have generally not worked in themes. Most of my artwork until recently has been random, and driven by my scattered inspirations. But recently I am finding that most of what I am working on has one common theme, and that is “peace.” It’s what I strive for in my life, and it’s what I feel strongly about putting out into the world. I’m discovering that I am still inspired by the same things I was inspired by when I was young ….. the light at the end of the day right before the sun goes down, old abandoned buildings, looking at the ocean, watching bird fly far up in a quiet sky, songs about love, …. peace.

It’s always struck me as very odd that artists are supposed to create a “statement” explaining their work. I’ve taken many, many classes where this was required. I believe that I have not gotten any better at it, after all this time. What I would like to do with this site is to bring anyone along that is interested in the process I go through. An artist statement doesn’t really show the journey, which to me is the best and most important part.

For those of you that are reading this, thank you!

I will be updating and posting as often as possible.

For those of you that wish you could create art, but think you can’t,…I encourage you to do it anyway. Do it for yourself. I promise you will get better if you keep going.

Wishing you peace!!!