Deepwater/Horizon

Here + Now

Pelicanus Occidentelis

Pyrocepholus Rubinus

Dianne Bennett has created art her entire life as a process of expressing, understanding and communicating her experience. Growing up in suburban Los Angeles in the 1960s, when orange trees outnumbered the houses, she saw subdivisions spring up where beloved meadows once bloomed and developed a passion for land conservation. A 20-year career as a graphic illustrator and logo designer informed the visual language of iconic symbols that she now uses in her mixed media works.

A commitment to sustainability influenced her choice of materials and she uses salvaged building materials, old metal signs, household objects, forgotten children’s toys along with other discarded items to create pictographs, rebuses and altars. Many of her retablos are oil painted on portions of an old, metal real estate sign advertising a housing tract in the 1970’s Ojai Valley.

“My work is created in hopes of shining a light on the ephemeral beauty of nature while raising questions about what we value, what we hold sacred and what is disappearing before our very eyes. Using an intuitive language of symbols, iconic portraits of birds, trees, plants and wildlife combined with idiomatic phrases and random thoughts, my intension is to create hieroglyphic messages to the future or postcards from the now.”