Artist Statement
I always knew from a young age that I wanted to be an artist. My passion for drawing and my desire to learn to paint propelled me to study at Paier College of Art in Hamden, Conn. It was there that I learned watercolors, which became my favorite medium, though I also work with oils, acrylics, and pastels on occasion.
My love of nature and the ocean inspire my landscape paintings. My early work was highly detailed and realistic, often working from photo references. As time went on, however, I came to realize the beauty in simplicity and abstraction. Uncomplicated shapes with muted colors provide an elegance to nature that I feel is sometimes overlooked.
As a result, most of my paintings now are not of one specific place but instead are an organic representation of the combination of time and nature. The soft and somewhat uncontrollable qualities of wet-on-wet watercolor painting allows me to achieve this feel, which I hope will inspire viewers to consider the beautiful fragility in the natural world around them.
Artist biography
Danielle DeCola was born and raised in North Branford, Conn., a small town outside of New Haven. She started painting with acrylics in high school, then concentrated in oils and watercolors in college. After graduating with a BFA from Paier College of Art in Hamden, Conn., in 1992, she started a small business as a pet portrait artist using soft pastels. She temporarily paused her art career after getting married and starting a family, though she continued doing pet portraits while raising her three sons.
As her children grew, and as she took up work in the custom picture framing industry, Danielle began to spend more time on her art again. Not only was she doing increasingly popular pet portraits, but she was also painting watercolor “house portraits” as closing gifts for a local real estate agent. During this period, she partnered with several real estate clients and painted more than 200 house portraits up and down the Connecticut shoreline.
In 2018, Danielle began selling her paintings at Swoon, a boutique home design store in Westport, Conn. She also started working more in oils and watercolors in a style that focused less on realism. Danielle soon found that this loose, abstract way of painting landscapes gave her more freedom to express herself and her views of nature.
Through Swoon and private sales, Danielle’s paintings now hang in homes up and down the East Coast. She has previously shown her art at Christian Siriano’s, The Collective West, the Hamden Art League, the Connecticut Pastel Society, and Erector Square. In addition, Danielle’s work has been published in Architectural Digest and Luxemagazine.
Currently, Danielle paints from her studio at Erector Square in New Haven while continuing to work as a professional picture framer. She lives in North Branford with her husband, their three sons, and two Labrador retrievers.
