Jaclyn Dionne
About
Dionne’s world is full of colours. She creates spirited paintings of voluptuous bouquets, intricate botanicals and imaginative landscapes. There is joy in the confident, bold brush strokes superimposed on colourful stains that build the many layers of colours and create her energy-filled works.
✓ Effortlessly Spectacular
✓ HARMONY of COLOURS
✓ VIBRANT VISIONS
‘Cause every night I lie in bed – The brightest colours fill my head – A million dreams are keeping me awake – I think of what the world could be – A vision of the one I see – A million dreams is all it’s gonna take – Oh a million dreams for the world we’re gonna make
songwriters, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
ACRYLIC ARTIST
Layers of Happiness
Luscious blooms made from bold brush strokes superimposed on layers of colourful stains, create the energy-filled works of Jaclyn Dionne. Dionne entwines layers of bright colour with gentle variations of grey that lead your eye around her paintings. There is much to see within a Dionne painting, but it’s also about how you feel while you explore. Dionne wants you to experience happiness within the colours and brush strokes.
Colourist
Dionne is a colourist who developed her own unique method of using a limited split-primary palette from which she creates what she calls a ‘sliding-scale’ primary palette. This approach gives harmony not only within a piece, but across all her paintings.
Within Dionne’s daily painting practice, colour is key as she experiments with colour mixing and strategic placement of contrast in both colour and shape to give her works their depth and feeling of harmony.
Music Infused
Music plays a key role in every painting session. Dionne will start the day with an “inspiration song” that drives the emotions that work into each painting, Then continuing with a similar playlist, her head bobs, shoulders shift, hips swing and singing (off-key) Dionne translates this energy into the colours, the brush work, and the concepts developed on the canvas
“A great painting session, with music that allows my creativity to just float along, leaves me in a creative high for the rest of the day,” Dionne says.
Try the link to the left. This is the song that helped drive the movement of the painting above, Maeve.
Lifelong Creative
As a lifelong creative working with media from fabric to metal clay, using skills from graphic design to rug hooking, Dionne has spent her life learning the skill of art in all its forms and understands that an ability requires time to take hold.
With a daily practice in digital art on her iPad, Dionne feels it natural that she want to learn to paint with a real brush and paints. She chose to learn to work with acrylics as her medium of choice.
“The more I learned, the more I realized that I needed to learn. Some days (still) it’s a daunting task to take the skill of painting and make it mine.” says Dionne of her studies.
While her current work hurdles the line between abstracted impressionism and impressionism, Dionne’s art studies have been mainly focused on impressionistic representative art. When asked about the abundance of flowers, Dionne says,
“I have no idea where all these florals have come from – I suppose from the music. I honestly thought my direction would be landscape painting. But left to my own imagination and with music bouncing around my head, flowers are what have escaped this crazy brain of mine.”
FUN FACT – In 2024, Dionne painted for over 34,000 minutes, listening to Spotify.
Studies
Dionne began painting in early 2022. While she is what most would call a self-taught artist, Dionne feels that this is a misnomer as in reality for two years she spent countless hours each week dedicated to learning the foundations of art principles from professional artists in Canada and the United States (to whom she owes a debt of thanks). Dionne studied with Nancy Medina, an oil and acrylic painter who specializes in impressionistic florals. Through Acrylic University, her studies were mainly focused on landscape painting under impressionist artists Jed Dorsey and Dianna Shyne, as well as monthly guest artists such as Jennifer Bowman and Angela Bandurka. Dionne was introduced to portraiture with bold brush marking and colour through Bold School and its founder, Charla Maarschalk. With Noémie Côté, she studied open impressionism. Long fascinated with abstraction, Dionne also studied creating abstraction using mediums with Deniz Altug and it is this particular skill development that forms the basis of Dionne’s layer building.
If influenced by any artists, Dionne says she aspires to create as fearlessly as contemporary artists Julia Veenstra, Wyanne Thompson, Peter Batchelder, Paul Evans and Adam Young. These artists specialize in paintings with a distinctive voice and bold use of colour.
Dionne works from her studio in Wallace, Nova Scotia, a tiny village on the shores of the Northumberland Strait. She has affectionately named her studio Fox Meadow Studio, in honour of the foxes that play each summer in the field outside her studio window.
DIGITAL ARTIST
Dionne is also an accomplished digital artist. With a graphic design background and Adobe Creative Suite in her tool belt, it was natural for Dionne to delve into digital art with her Apple pencil and the app, Procreate.
✓ DIGITAL ART
✓ ILLUSTRATION
✓ SURFACE DESIGN
“Seeing a design I have created, off my iPad and onto a tangible product, never fails to thrill me.”
For Dionne it started with illustrations, shifted into complicated multi-layered digital paintings and then, as she is a self-confessed fabric hoarder, surface pattern design was a natural transition. Dionne has had her designs used on wall blocks, fabric, blankets and mugs. Now Dionne also uses Procreate and Adobe Illustrator to manipulate her painted art for prints and other surface applications.
COLLABORATIONS: Contact Dionne to discuss your collaboration ideas.