Primrose Diakow
The Alberta landscape, Diakow’s Ukrainian heritage, Byzantine traditions in art, and respect and reverence for the earth all motivate her work, which depicts landscapes, figures, and religious concepts in acrylic, oil, enamel, watercolour, and clay sculpture. Her portraits especially express what she feels about her life and about God, and take on not just documentary but prophetic qualities. Diakow’s subjects sit for her in their own spaces, where she does preliminary drawings, then she completes the paintings in her home studio from memory. Considering the photograph a dead image, she believes that “if an artist has to copy a photograph, he or she might as well forget about trying to do a painting.”