Ina Rowing | Aine Divine

Description

W62 X H77

**Please note** Price does not include delivery. We will be in contact after purchase to advise.

About the Artist

Aine Divine is an acclaimed Irish-born painter whose work radiates emotion, warmth and emotional heft. An artist and teacher born in County Cork, she studied fine art at the Crawford College of Art before completing a higher diploma in art teaching. She is now based in Edinburgh and has established a reputation as an acclaimed artist and teacher, committed to capturing her own sense of likeness and capturing the soul of her sitter. Although working occasionally in oils and acrylic, Divine prefers watercolour. Traditionally watercolour is a medium reserved for landscapes, often considered to be lacking in depth, particularly for portrait pieces. Aine rejects these preconceived restraints on the medium, producing portraits with great emotional depth, impact and poignancy. Divine’s paintings encompass an impressive range, spanning vibrant mixed media floral pieces to intimate portraiture. Despite producing a huge range, all of her paintings share a commonality; the ability to capture a dynamism and an emotional presence. When she can, Divine prefers to paint directly from the sitter to observe life happening over the course of the day. She describes this as a ‘holy process,’ and a ‘privilege’ to be able to observe someone else for that length of time, not something one gets to do often in modern life. Aine Divine’s skill and distinctive voice have earned her repeated recognition. She was a finalist in Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year in 2014, painting public figures including Cicely Berry and Sir Ian McKellen. One of Aine’s self-portraits was selected for exhibition in the Royal Watercolour Society’s annual contemporary art show at the Bankside Gallery in London also in 2014 and won the Heatherleys Studio Award. She won Winsor and Newton awards for her portrait of Matthew in the same show in 2013, and for ‘Carolina in Gold’ in 2015. It is this emotional authenticity, paired with technical mastery and a deep commitment to painting from life, that makes Aine Divine’s work so resonated and sought-after by collectors. Her floral compositions, painted in her garden studio or directly in nature, pulse with the same energy and immediacy as her portraits, celebrating colour, form, and light. Divine likes to start with a series of charcoal drawings, which she finds warms up the body and helps her to find the right composition. Her sketches are instinctive, preferring to capture energy and character over complete likeness. These charcoal strokes are the scaffolding to which she builds the portrait around. She begins by painting shadows and the dark side of the face, allowing drips to fall and splash down. Divine then turns the board at an angle, helping her to get space from the image and see it in a fresh way.