Trees and Diana Zasadny have a special arrangement. They stand there and look beautiful and mysterious and she captures their beauty and mystery – the steadfastness of their commitment to the earth and their dreamy stretching towards the sky.

They unabashedly pose for her, in groups or groves, inviting her to portray them in all their seasons. Skillfully selecting units of colour and assembling them into a story, she reveals the individuality and the collectiveness of nature’s finest sentinels. Fascinated by the interplay of light and shadow, colour and shape, depth and detail, Diana reveals a shimmering, sensuous fragment of the mystical whole – trees becoming an apt metaphor for the human condition – bound to the earth but striving towards the light.

A meeting of heaven and earth, trees embody the groundedness and earthiness of terra firma with the ethereal embodiment of the spirit. Diana magically captures the essence of both, each tableau a tapestry of woven light and form – a coming together of the seen and unseen. Her foresty mosaics escape the territory of the visual and drift into the property of the auditory as her paintings have been described as needing to be seen and heard as the wind sways the trees and audibly rustles the leaves.

Born and raised in Lethbridge Alberta, Diana paints who she is – bringing her appreciation of nature born of her love of the prairie and the sky – to all her compositions. Focusing primarily on landscape, Diana blends the boundaries of impressionist interpretation and contemporary abstaction into a glimpse of that elusive realm of life between reality and imagination.

 

(written by Lison McCullough)