Darlene is well experienced with the hardships and severities of life.
In her paintings, however, she often opts for the "salve of raw beauty".
She works from life, and also from photographs she has taken, along with working from paintings from art history.
Van Gogh created many of his great works, and at a very mature period in his evolution as an artist, working from previous masters. While institutionalized towards the end of his life, Vincent painted his fellow patients, the landscape about him, and often turned to previous masters' works, including "The Good Samaritan", after Delacroix.
Van Gogh also did a Pieta after Delacroix working from an engraving by Nanteuil. Vincent furthermore accomplished an amazing oil of a peasant farmer in his cottage garden working from a Millet.
Many famous Rubens paintings were rendered with surprising directness from the works of Titian.
Our viable visual field includes the realms of landscape, persons, objects in physical space, other persons' paintings, the television and movie screen, the computer monitor, and the vast realm of our own thoughts.
Sometimes in classic "outsider" art, the rendition is transmuted in the convulsive realm of consciousness of the recapitulating artist.
Other times the rendition seems straightforward ...the transmutation barely "visible".
In this piece Darlene chose to render her work in a relatively straightforward manner after a painting by Agnes Pelton, a female modernist painter of the Transcendentalist Group, active early to mid 20th Century, in California.
While many of Pelton's works are overtly mystical, the subject in the Pelton which Darlene chose is a bottle brush tree. It protrudes over a serene lake that has formed in the crater of a still active volcano. Steam rises from the surface of the body of water.
Still water, not only can run deep, but can encompass, embrace, nurture, or even betray, a deep volatility.
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