Irene Dahl paints her inner peace
Painter Irene Dahl calls her work “my own special language.” She grew up in West Germany where, on her seventh birthday, her father, an anti-fascist, was killed. “I went into shock. I didn’t speak for a year. I used art. I painted myself back to sanity,” she said, and she has painted ever since.
In Germany, she studied under German, Polish and English painters and would take excursions to Denmark to paint. She became a psychotherapist and often used art in her work to help patients. She also did it to relax.
She met her husband when he was in Germany working on an English/German dictionary. Fifteen years ago, when she retired, they moved to the United States and settled in Spokane.
She took classes in the area, met other artists and began showing her work, winning local and national awards. She joined the River Ridge Association of Fine Arts and served as president for a couple of years. Ten years ago, her husband died of bone cancer.
To the best of her ability, she is at peace with her past, and it is reflected in her large body of work. Her work ranges from realistic portraits to what she calls “semi or real abstracts,” with some that have recognizable features and others that leave it all up to the viewer’s imagination. “I want them to feel something peaceful. I want to make them think,” she said, “My work is like a Japanese haiku where you have to finish the thought on your own.”
Her North Side home is filled with her work as well as pieces by German artists and antiques from Germany, including a large handcrafted china hutch that has been in her family for 100 years. She has even built a room divider out of old cabinet doors and painted both sides of the tall panels in different styles representing the surreal and the real.
Her range of style is large and illustrates her ability to use mood to overcome, express and relay feelings and thoughts. Her work tells stories. Her mediums include pastels, egg tempura and acid and oil paint on aged copper sheets. In her artist’s statement Dahl wrote: “The brilliance of life and transformation, aging and change is what I want to show with my works on copper-plate. I take my pieces through an extensive aging process before I install them on wood-cradle and paint them with metallic oil-colours. The painting process for me is like meditation. I want to create quiet and pleasing art that inspires the viewers.”
She works in a basement studio and, when weather permits, in an outdoor sitting place. When beginning a piece she often has an idea in her head; sometimes the flaws in the copper suggest a theme. She adds many layers, giving depth to the piece. Her work is “aah” inspiring, peaceful and meditative, for that is her language.