About me

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Darlene Te Young

Dip Design

Pictured here with ‘Wedding Day’, my award winning entry into the 2019 Hibiscus and Bays Art Awards.

My Art practice is painting and drawing based, working in oil, acrylic, charcoal and ink across two juxtaposing styles.

Growing up as an adoptee with a vacuum of knowledge around my identity, our collection of family photographs took on a wistful significance. My portrait series began with this remembrance, a gentle and reverent honouring of my history, a way of keeping it alongside. 

I keep a faithfulness to the style and era of the source image, yet I seek to bring energy and life force to the subject. Planning my composition well ahead, I allow for departure from the original, and add or subtract detail to help bring focus. I work exclusively in oil for portraits, as it’s slow drying nature is the perfect medium to allow for the more slow-time demands of colour blending.

When engaging with my natural surroundings ( most usually here in beautiful Whangaparāoa, Auckland) I’m inspired by fleeting moments of changing light, the play of sun and shadow as they move in time across land and sea. I endeavour to capture these nurturing, sometimes melancholic moments of reflection and respond with subtle tonality and expressive mark making, using combinations of charcoal, ink, acrylic and pastel. These mediums permit multiple layers in one session, allowing for spontaneity and play

I work concurrently in these different styles, there is an energy that exists between the push and pull of one image and technique against the other. I value the freedom this allows me in expressing varying sides of my nature.

My site is not commerce enabled, but rather serves me as an online portfolio. If you wish to enquire about any of the works that are available, or about a private commission, I would love to hear from you via email or phone.