Dana Velan, an artist living and working in Montreal, Canada, left her native Czecho-Slovakia during the political turmoil of 1968. She earned a degree in Art History at McGill University and a degree in Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, and her MFA at Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, Boston, Massachusets.
Velan started as a printmaker but soon moved on to work on drawings, one-of-a-kind books and some 3-dimensional pieces. Her life experiences and travels through the unusual landscapes, such as Iceland, Australia and Africa, contribute inspiration to her unique artistic aesthetic. She creates in series. Nests, Hearths, Stages, Fire, Nightland and Termination Flags are just a few titles of her drawings. Nightland series are large-scale drawings (90” x 126”) which demonstrate her interest in natural phenomena and their impact on the human soul. Using oil sticks on mylar Velan created images that are metaphors for our inner landscape.
The newer series of drawings map the imaginary landscapes. Spaceless and legendless these drawings escape exact definitions. They can be images of cells and veins as they criss-cross inside a body, or they can be rivers and roads, towns and cities, mountains and lakes in landscapes seen from above. Some are executed in pen and ink and watercolor, and some with oils sticks on mylar, these maps very loosely pretend to reality. But at the end they are the lines, cellular dots and watery stains that contract and expand in the space of white paper or mylar. Blending together inner and external landscapes without giving the coordinate system leaves the images open to a number of unknown meditations.