Diane Beard is a photographer who takes pictures of her immediate community of Welland, often manipulating the images to have a surreal or abstracted quality. She was one of the featured artists in the Welland Creatives Network’ 13 on the 13th exhibition at the Welland Historical Museum in 2022.
Diane is the widow of artist Ross Beard and was instrumental in helping to mount a previous exhibition in this space that featured Ross’ work.
Having been surrounded by Ross’s awe-inspiring art, sharing the same love of nature and appreciation for the Niagara area, driven by grief combined with a loss of identity after Ross’s passing, yet with no formal training, Diane began taking photographs as means to express her feelings and emotions. Diane’s sense of color and form transcends a simple mundane scene into something abstract and at times unrecognizable mimicking the profound change in her life.
This exhibition was on view for the month of June, 2023. It was the seventh in an ongoing series I’m curating that platforms visual artists in Niagara.
Diane shares many of her images – as she is a prolific artist – on her social media feed.