BIO
Born in Connecticut, Dana Denham Marsh is an American painter whose work occupies a world somewhere between memory, mythology and lived experience. Working in oil and cold wax, acrylic, charcoal and pastel, she creates richly worked surfaces from which figures and forms emerge-faces, cowboys, horses, wanderers, abstract gestures and solitary characters who feel at once familiar and unknowable.
Marsh is drawn to figures who seem to exist at the edges: the lonesome hero, the rebel, the outsider, their person caught somewhere between leaving and belonging. Her imagery moves freely between the figurative and the abstract, the intimate and the mythic. At times her paintings carry traces of American mythology, but beneath the swagger and romance runs something more vulnerable-a persistent sense of longing, tenderness and uncertainty.
Her process is intuitive and physical. Images are built, scraped away, drawn over and rediscovered. Across the work, toughness and fragility coexist; humor sits beside loneliness, beauty beside abrasion, freedom beside the desire for home.
Marsh exhibits along the East Coast and sells her painting and prints privately across the country.
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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.