Venue #24 - Holland House, Rossie Place
Diana savova
Paintings
Diana has lived and worked in Edinburgh since 2011. She has been pursuing her professional artistic practice ranging from painting and fine art conservation to large-scale murals and book illustrations for over 20 years.
Light, colour and magic realism is where she often draws inspiration for her current painting and drawing projects employing watercolour, ink, oil and acrylic. She focus on landscapes, cityscapes and dreamscapes as she feels compelled to mix reality and fantasy in compositions which juxtapose uncommon imagery as if in a dream. This new lineage of works with surreal motifs now seem to strongly resonate with the strange surrealism of the novel Coronavirus pandemic. Recently, she has also discovered acrylic pouring and has been exploring it since. Combining accidental pouring with hyper-realistic surreal details in both acrylic and oil paints has come to define her current practice. Currently, she is working on paintings which revolve around the idea of retelling classic fairy tales through magic realism. She revisits some of the classic fairy tales that she grew up with in the South of Europe and tries to contrast them with the stories her young child is now growing up with in the North of Europe. With the provisional title Contemporary Fairy-Tale Magic, this new body of paintings looks at the impact of fairy tales on our shared European contemporary cultures with special emphasis on how we can re-imagine the global climate, ecological and health emergencies for new audiences.
In February 2020, Diana received a Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award through Creative Scotland and the City of Edinburgh Council towards the curatorial mentorship of Iliyana Nedkova as part of Diana’s second major solo exhibition in Scotland at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh. Initially scheduled as part of Edinburgh International Fringe Festival in August 2020, this second solo show was rescheduled due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. With the provisional title Contemporary Fairy-Tale Magic this new exhibition follows Colours 1-30 July 2016 at North Edinburgh Arts – Diana’s first solo show in Scotland.
