Art

art Where real meets surreal

By DIANE PHILLIPS

SOME artists live to paint. Dyah Neilson lives amidst her paintings. To get to a drawer for a T-shirt, she has to shuffle past art supplies before she juggles canvases leaning up against the dresser. To climb into bed, she crawls over works in progress.

Dyah’s bedroom-turned-studio is her safe haven, but the industrious artist, who also holds a nearly full-time day job at the Oasis furniture and décor store, is bursting out with more work than she has space to contain and more desire to paint than she has hours in the day.

“I usually start in the late afternoon and work well into the evening, sometimes until one or two in the morning,” said the 25-year-old.

She exudes the same almost ethereal quality that fills the canvases of her work, a juxtaposition between the real and the surreal.

In one large piece, a young man with long dreadlocks and eyes closed seems only mildly aware that he is holding a giant grouper while another is atop his head. The theme of animals imposing themselves, competing for attention, even dominating humans, is a main feature of many of her portraits. “My work is creative portraits that combine animals and people, compositions where the person is the focus but the animal is used to symbolise different things throughout history, or culturally and spiritually. In a commissioned piece called ‘Kingfisher’, the prominent-beaked birds by the same name adorn a dark-skinned woman. We know little about her from the painting despite the intense detail showing thick, coiffed hair, a cowrie shell strand around her neck, strong breastbone structure. We sense an inner strength, but what we do know is about the birds that have chosen to land on her shoulders and over her head. The artist chose kingfishers because they are symbolic of prosperity, abundance, wealth and peace,” she said.

Although portraiture is her favourite, the young Bahamian artist, who holds a Bachelors’ degree in Fine Arts from York University in Canada, is equally comfortable with wildlife and historic sea life. What seems different from the rest of her work, as if she had lived in another era, is the body of work she calls seascapes. In those, she depicts two-masted ketches, wooden hulls, rounded bow and stern like a double-ender, full sails but struggling, always a hint of trouble ahead. Dyah started painting as a child. “I never thought about it. There was never a moment that it was not part of my life,” she said. “I have proof from when I was in kindergarten.”

That’s when she wrote the following on a bear the teacher gave her to colour: “I want to grow up to be an artist and be happy.”

Her parents saw her interest and encouraged her; her father creating a gallery wall to hang her pictures on. Her mother also showed artistic promise – something she is just getting back to now after a decades-long break – and both her father and her sister have a passion for photography.

Dyah studied with Sonya Isaacs and Kim Smith when she was young and did an internship at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas before leaving for college. She had a successful one-woman show at Doongalik Studios and her work is in private collections ranging from California to Canada.

Originally, however, she intended to study interior design.

“I love design and I worked at Restoration Hardware in Canada for a while,” she said.

Now, she is the store manager at Oasis, which offers contemporary indoor furniture at Sandyport and an outdoor style location on East Shirley Street.

“It’s the best of both worlds,” said Dyah. “I am around beautiful things all day, the owner, Brooke Pyfrom, encourages me to display my work and supports it, refusing to take any commission, and I am able to keep working more every evening at home.”

According to Brooke, blending a furniture, décor and gift store with art is natural.

“When what the eye sees brings a smile to your face, that’s what matters. It may come in the form of a beautiful, handcrafted table, the fragrance of a candle or a canvas that Dyah created. It’s all about hitting that certain happy place in your heart,” she said.

The only problem for the artist herself is squeezing so much inspiration into a day that has only 24 hours and so many supplies into a narrow room built for sleeping.

Artist Dyah Neilson and, below left, her creation Seahorse Queen.