BIO
Dana Denham Marsh was born in southern Connecticut. She studied art and art history at Colgate University and SUNY Purchase in New York. She lived in Los Angeles and NYC combined for twenty years. Dana is a writer and performer as well as a painter. She produced, wrote and performed her one person show, “Francis, Somebody to Love” in both New York and LA. She has spent the last decade living in Asheville, North Carolina with her partner, Patty, and her band of misfit pets. Dana shows her work along the east coast and sells privately across the country.
ARTIST STATEMENT
For me, art is everything because it is creation. If I don’t create, I don’t feel alive. The freedom I get from the process is why I do it. When I don’t exercise my creativity in one form or another I feel shut down and often depressed or bored. Painting breaks me down even as it lifts me up. This process of creation for me usually begins in chaos, sometimes even haste, and it ends in stillness and care.
My art is about waking up. It’s about life and shedding what we are programmed to think and feel and experience what lies beneath. It’s raw and unapologetic in it’s nature. It’s messy and imperfect because it touches on what can’t be seen, but felt. My paintings focus on the dynamic between the true self and the illusions that have been forced on us by society and the systems that run it. My art reaches into source connection. It’s not pro this or anti that but it observes these polarities that shape us since birth. Creations are mirrors and as we evolve and question what is presented to us, the reflections can shift and change as we do. In this case, the stories within the paintings evolve with the viewer who is looking into them.
My paintings are about isolation, pain, grief, Joy, and Grace. It’s about you and me and some days we love ourselves and some days we can’t bare to even look . They are our stories, individually and as a collective.
I want my paintings to express expansion and the act of remembering what it’s like to be awake and alive.