Dianne Trewin

Dianne Trewin is a Northland artist who lives and works in Whangarei.  

She studied  painting under Colin McCahon, Garth Tapper and Robert Ellis in the late 1960’s.  First exhibiting at the Northland Society of Arts as a working member in the early 1970’s, she continued to show works in group and solo exhibitions until 1979.  A gap of several years followed when life and motherhood took precedent and she pulled back from her work. 

In 2003 a well received exhibition with David Cunis showed she was back. 

In 2004  Dianne started working with charts, and an exhibition based on charts in the Pickmere Atlas of Northland East Coast of New Zealand was a sell out.  This led to an exhibition based on maps held by the Kauri Museum, Matakohe. The use of charts worked well with her fascination with line.  Using water colour and ink she brought life and personal contact to works – fragments of memory – her different treatment and approach to identical images reflecting individual approaches to living and the creation of memory and physical attachment to a physical location at a given time.  Further exhibitions based on this theme were held at the Bach, Whangarei and The Depot in Auckland.

In early 2007 Dianne grasped an opportunity to travel through south west Queensland, Australia.  The land had been drought stricken for seven years, and while in the area a small amount of rain fell causing almost immediate changes to the land.   In these works gold paint reflected the mineral wealth of the land, and longitude and latitude suggesting it is the luck of the draw as to where our personal homeland lies.

This exhibition shows works emanating from various workshops with Auckland  artist James Lawrence.  These works appear to be purely abstract, however they all start with an idea which develops through the painting process. Certain elements continue through her work – the use of line dominates, with colour and mass providing strong imagery in these works.

Dianne Trewin has works in private and corporate collections in New Zealand and overseas (Australia, England, Germany, China, Malaysia and US)

Quote: A really good picture looks as if it has happened at once …..it takes ten over laboured efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronised with

your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it was born in a minute.

Helen Frankenthaler  1928

…” Dianne’s paintings are explosively energetic with no hold on the use of exciting, bold colour leaping across the possibilities available to abstraction. A few of her more ‘mellow’ works glow with subtle hue and value changes. I particularly like her use of resin where she deliberately leaves small areas of the painting’s surface unsaturated allowing interaction with ambient light. Dianne’s paintings are temptingly tactile and charged with emotion – the viewer is encouraged to touch each surface. “ …

From Mike Nettmann’s “About the Arts” review in the Bay Chronicle’s ”