Softly Lit, Impressionist Oil Paintings by Dianne Mize

This week’s featured artist is Dianne Mize, a former high-school art teacher and art school instructor from Georgia whose paintings are full of soft colors, impressionist brush strokes, and a glowing sense of light.

Dianne’s subjects range from vast, cloud-covered landscapes to natural florals, to grazing cows, and even small woodland creatures (like the inquisitive squirrel below).

Entitled Ready to Leap, this painting shows how judicious use of cool, light colors (like light blue and green) can help give dimensionality and depth to a painting without weighing it down with darker values.

You can see in Irises and Light, below, that Dianne’s used some of the same bluish tints on the edges of the irises to give shape to their blooms.

I absolutely love the loose brush strokes seen above, and all throughout Dianne’s work. Her subjects often appear on the verge of movement, or even dance.

This next painting, Sautee Herefords, is a great example of that, and is just one painting in a fantastic series of bovine portraits which you’ll find on Dianne’s art blog.

If you have a moment, I’d highly suggest visiting Dianne’s blog and browsing through her other paintings. I found her recent studies of dogwood flowers to be quite beautiful, and there are plenty more that are worth a look too.

In addition, for those of you interested in artistic composition, I’d also suggest bookmarking Dianne’s second blog on compositional techniques. There’s some great information there that all artists can make use of.