Biography

Deanna Chilian was born in the Northeast, lived in Colorado and then Asheville, NC before making her current residence in the vibrant city of Pittsburgh, PA. Her path to art as a profession has included the practice of law, non-profit management, and a career teaching pilates and Gyrotonic®. Each has contributed to her development as an artist: the ability to craft and communicate a message; an eye for both balance and tension in a composition; a tactile awareness and sense of movement that informs the texture and flow of a work surface. Time spent outdoors in the Rocky Mountains and traveling through the Southwest has left an indelible imprint on her innate sense of color and line, resulting in a vibrancy in her work that is both stimulating and soothing. Her work invites the viewer in and offers the eye places to meander. While her work is non-representational, it speaks to universal themes of longing and belonging, of ecstasy and struggle, and the celebration of the rich experience that resides in both darkness and light

Her lifelong interest and passion for making art, specifically painting, has remained steady and evolving. She draws inspiration from Georgia O’Keeffe, Hilma af Kilmt, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Richard Diebenkorn, Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. Her art education has been through mentorships and time on the canvas. She studies and workshops with Katherine Chang-Liu, Gwen Fox, and Skip Lawrence. Deanna has exhibited in many group and solo shows and her work is in personal and corporate collections in the US, Europe, Japan and the Middle East.

Deanna is not here to play it safe. Her art explores the visual subconscious, her own curiosity about the Great Mysteries and is an invitation to seek the truth that resides within each of us. In response to these dynamic times in which we are living, her abstract expressions provide a vocabulary large enough for what we are feeling collectively. Her work digs towards the essence, the point, the underbelly of the world, offering an invitation to stand before it and be moved by it.