Bio

Grace Dines is an American artist born in Atlanta in 1997, currently living and working in Annecy, France. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work examines focus and deduction of detail to explore the ideas of visual perception. She uses graphite powder and dry pigment to create soft imagery. Her imagery is inspired from her photography, where she experiments with depth of field, shutter speed, and focus to abstract the subject. A new sense of her subject is found through this process. The work becomes more intimate as she renders the images by hand and the textual nature of the materials encourage a more personal connection.

Artist Statement

In my work I examine focus and deduction of detail to explore the ideas of visual perception. My process started from my intrigue of out-of-focus photographs. I was drawn to the soft forms that were created from the lens and they became the inspiration for my current work, where I make renderings of plants in nature, I’m exploring through photography, by brushing dry pigment and graphite on paper.

I began to investigate the concept of perception. In my work, viewers may find the tendency to fill in information that is abstracted, but instead discover a moment of intrigue in its absence of details. Rather than offer the viewer a literal representation of the subject, I encourage a broader, more expansive perspective of it. It matters less that you can or cannot tell what the physical subject is, and rather the embrace of the form of the subject and what can be created from it.

Photography is a tool I use to discover composition and abstract my subject, in contrast to more traditional photography where visual details become important in identification of a subject. The camera has the technological ability to see in ways the human eye cannot, and I take advantage of this in my work. The subject is framed through the lens and abstracted by experimenting with depth of field, shutter speed, and focus to capture a new sense. 

The work extends beyond photography when I render the image with powdered graphite and brushes by hand. In the transition the work becomes intimate and the textural nature of the materials encourage a more personal connection. It leaves the digital realm and in a way returns to nature. The delicate nature of the imagery translates to paper with graphite powder and brush as the process demands thoughtful care showing through the many layers of powder built upon the surface. The tactile quality of the paper and the graphite powder allow for a more intricate surface than experienced in photography, and the tone of the paper becomes an illuminous element. 

Whether my pieces are paintings or drawings is an unresolved declaration. I believe my work lives between the two disciplines, neither completely one or the other. Perhaps the boundary between the disciplines does not exist in my work at all.