Artist’s Statement:

Currently, Destanne is a candidate for the Master of Fine Art degree at the University of Tasmania in Australia. Painted Pools: a lens into subjectivity is the title of her research project, which investigates water as a metaphor for life. In modern psychology water is the symbol of the unconscious and water imagery is linked to dreams. It is a feminine principal – emotive, receptive and endowed with characteristics of the mother representing intuitive wisdom. To be immersed in water signifies a return to the pre-formal state – birth on the one hand, death on the other. Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her book, Women Who Run with the Wolves, writes how water as this ‘creative force flows over the terrain of our psyches looking for the natural hollows, the arroyos, the channels that exist in us. We become its tributaries, its basins; we are its pools…’ It is suggested the pool is a body and the body is a pool. Featured above are four of Destanne’s paintings from the project entitled, Embodied Pool 1, 2 & 3, and Where Vestiges Surface and Emerge.

Biography

Destanne received a BFA (Honours) Degree in Painting and Drawing from the Univeristy of Victoria in 1987. After ten years of raising a young family and managing a resort in Jasper National Park, Destanne began to pursue her passion for painting full-time. Primarily an oil painter of landscapes, her practice and work was based upon her direct experiences in nature while on adventures into wilderness and natural environment areas. She was very fortunate to have Doris McCarthy, one of Canada’s highly regarded landscape painters as a mentor, and also contemporary landscape painter, David Alexander. In 2003 Destanne accepted an offer to undertake post-graduate research at the University of Tasmania, which has a strong concentration in Natural Environment and Art.  At this time she was represented by three galleries in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan; she had participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions, in addition to various special projects; and she could be found in many private and corporate collections, including the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Consulate General, Japan. Upon returning to Canada in 2006, Destanne moved to Vernon to live and complete her studies. You may now find her work at Gallery Odin, www.galleryodin.com and in the art rental program at the Vernon Art Gallery, www.vernonartgallery, where she is a member, along with Gallery Vertigo.