Angharad Dean left a successful career as a planner to take up her long time ambition to paint in oils.  Angharad’s career as a planner culminated in the publication of the Canberra Spatial Plan – the long term strategy for the future of Australia’s capital city. She turned from working with people and landscape (taking a 4 dimensional view of the world) to capturing the immediacy of light, colour and movement in 2 dimensions: now she attempts to capture the 4^th dimension in the medium of the 2nd.

Angharad uses oils to capture fleeting impressions of light and colour.  She says ‘I spend my days enjoying the view – I concentrate on recording the shifting colours of nature as they are in the moment I see them.’ 

Angharad also works with oils to produce still life and portrait paintings, all in the impressionist style she has adopted.  She accepts commissions and welcomes visitors to her studio to view her other works.

Angharad took up the paintbrush in 2005 and since then, fitting her painting around the needs of her 8 year old son and 16 year old daughter, she has completed over 150 works.

Angharad prefers to work outside at the scene of her painting, but weather and time do not always allow for paintings to be completed in this way.  Her studio allows her the flexibility to work on more than one painting at a time in all weathers.

She is (still!) married to her webmaster and photographer.

In October 2009, Angharad finally talked her father, Brian Dean, award winning artist and teacher, into jointly exhibiting his ground breaking and uplifting lithographs with her recent paintings.  Brian’s lithographs from this exhibition can be viewed following this link

A journey of discovery 

At first I tried to reproduce what I saw, using a technique which captured the light of the moment, perhaps re-created an emotion or a fleeting feeling engendered by that which I saw.  These images, though faithful to the subject, did not satisfy me.

Then I realised I wanted to create images that moved, that moved the viewer.  Pure images, images of shifting light.   Light changes every instant and it is impossible to capture that instant when to paint what one sees takes many hours.  Rather I now attempt to create a painting that moves and dances, just as light does.  The dance might be slow moving and tranquil, swirling and intense, gentle and soft, bright and hard.