Alice… your commercial artist and art teacher
Creating meaningful art… one brushstroke at a time
I am Alice Dardaneliotis – welcome to my studio!
Like many commercial artists and art teachers, I have had a love for the arts since childhood. It started with simple sketching before I moved to acrylic paints. Once I graduated to oil paints, there was no turning back! I had found my true love.
However, unlike many commercial artists and art teachers, my focus isn’t on textbooks, ‘best practice’ and hard and fast rules. Art is not black and white, and I love blurring the shades of grey for myself and my pupils.
We are all different, all unique. How we see what is around us, how we experience our environment, and how we engage with our surroundings is all subjective. Art provides a mechanism to express our individuality – our unique perspective and our take on the life around us.
My passion…
I absolutely love still life and landscapes – love them!– and for a few different reasons.
I love taking my pupils through a process and helping them create a physical representation of their perspective. We assume that we all see the same things, but we don’t often realise how individual our interpretations are. Everything we see is uniquely coloured by our emotions, thoughts and experience. Seeing how this manifests itself through painting and sketching is incredible.
I also love the historical relationship with still life and landscapes - that split second where a moment is captured on canvas. I vividly remember painting a landscape of a tin shed and old barn, with a large tree in the foreground, at Mulgoa (near Penrith, West of Sydney) before the fires that devastated the community in late 2001. The house next to the sheds burnt down and the sheds have since been rebuilt, but my canvas captures my memories.
My inspiration…
I seek influence and inspiration from a variety of sources. I’ve travelled the country to see exhibitions by artists as diverse as Turner, Picasso, the Impressionists and the Spanish Artists.
I am heavily influenced by our home-grown Australian landscape artists and their magical use of colours – their use of blues, ochres, siennas and greens is phenomenal! And living in Australia, we are blessed to have such immediate access to nature – who cannot be inspired by the sun rising and setting, the birds chatting, and the leaves falling?
My recognition…
My work has been widely recognised in various art shows including the highly-contested Sydney Royal Easter Show. But the greatest recognition is being commissioned as a commercial artist for various works that are used in the corporate world and in literature.
For me, it’s about the process. Emotions and thoughts. Texture and perspective. Light and dark. History and perception.
Alice’s Brush Strokes Art is my dream art studio – a studio where not only I can create visual magic, but also inspire and guide others to do the same.
