‘Diana Copperwhite makes big bold oil paintings that excite and stir our twenty-first-century perceptions. Her compelling images are both complex and energetic. She is never at a loss for the impulse to paint, though she is coy about revealing her concerns, often throwing the viewer just a few clues and leaving a lot of room for the imagination. She creates an exquisite tension between abstraction and figuration or representation of any kind. She appears to tease out this tension to hold our interest, as we both take in the visual splendor of her paintings and try to fathom what they are about’… ‘We find vibrating spectral bands have become a kind of a trademark in Copperwhite’s recent large paintings, recalling that as she grew up, chemistry and physics were common topics at home. From a more ordinary point of view, these spectral bands can be read as an upbeat reminder of a rainbow after a storm. Yet their colors are often altered beyond those visible in nature. In fact, Copperwhite believes that in her paintings she has responded to Ireland’s changeable weather, which may have caused her to see the world as if she was looking through a visor into a “grey low-light vision.”
Extracted from Reality, Virtual Reality, and Abstraction by Gail Levin