RESUME
I am Astrid Dahl, an Australian artist and began my study of art in Australia with a masters in Art, however I consider that I am still learning. I constantly experiment and after 45+ years of painting and teaching art I am still evolving. It is in the act of creating itself that most excites me. My aim is to reach beyond myself and let the creative forces take me above and beyond my initial expectations. In other words, to reach my highest level of self-expression.
My main focus is the landscape – not in the literal sense but its poetry, its spirituality, its philosophy and its distilled abstractedness. I process, discover and redefine my life through interpretations of the land – the Mother – my beginning and my ultimate end. I get my initial inspirations from travelling – Tibet, the Thar Desert India, The Great Sandy Desert and the Gibson Desert in Western Australia. I have travelled across the Nullarbor Plains 6 times by car, from Melbourne to Perth, collecting fragments, bottling the sands, sketching and taking photos to be used in later work.

In the 80s when I saw for the first time, the brick red earth, the clear azure blue sky and the sparse desert growth struggling to survive. I fell in love with the remote rawness of the out-back and saw an analogy to my own life at the time. I keep my connections with desert country having had a recent long camping trip, from Perth to Broome. The gathering of inspiration from this trip is still the subject for many landscapes since.
I think we all live in a desert and we try to populate it with our hopes and dreams, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. Everyone’s desert is different and at times not of our own choosing.

The materials I use varies with each painting and I waver between semi abstractness and some semblance of recognition. I enjoy making each piece unique in its concept. I use acrylics and sometimes combine it with oils and a variety of textures and mediums including gold and silver leaf. Each painting is on canvas, stretched on a wooden frame and varnished with a satin finish.