Artist Statement

I use smoke, paint, clay, and collage to explore the qualities that exist in the nature of change and impermanence.
Trails of incandescent candles, slithering drips of colors, clusters of glitter and found materials blur the line between ephemera and permanence.  Beauty and decay. Intuition and cognition. Illusion and reality.
A serendipitous encounter, a walk along the shore, or a cut out from a magazine generate paintings and drawings that explore human relations, the physical realities and conspicuous nature of ephemera and memory, by framing the illusive obviousness of these realities in time and space through objectively depicted materials.

"Daphne Arthur’s smoke on paper, employ an interesting technique. Her drawings remind one of tableaux vivants, or stage-like pieces that convey the unmistakable feeling of entering a room. Arthur has made her work teem with narrative and life. She is telling a complex story, yet shrouding the narrative in a complicated set of visual techniques. With the drawing Marks of Dust That Wander, specks of gold leaf nearly float off the paper and rest on the eye, making the work both precious and ominous, like a too fattening piece of cake asking to be eaten. Even without knowing the medium, one still senses the smoky and cloudy atmosphere these works possess. Shadows, the faint hint of plants, foliage and architecture all set the scene. A figure, round breast, flowing gossamer gown, the trunk of a tree, a smoky, secret garden emerge captivating and catapulting us to another culture (perhaps the Pacific Rim). Her work is a travelogue of her imagination and precise story telling. In viewing Arthur’s work, we are not here, we are there."
by Louis Zoellar Bickett, Lexington, KY