Dara Oshin is an American born visual artist living in Brooklyn, NY.  Working across disciplines, Dara uses oil, pencil, ink, gouache, photography and digital media as a means to explore interpersonal relationships. Her emotionally driven work reflects her observations of daily life and often embodies a narrative or conceptual component. Dara’s current body of work plays with cliche’ and preconceived ideas of family, love and romance by combining drawings with abstracted photographs of objects within the domestic setting in order to create images that highlight the discord between what is imagined and what is real.

Dara received her BA from Allegheny College with a concentration in English Literature and Studio Art. Over the following decade Dara lived in Israel, Switzerland and France where she continued to develop her painting and drawing skills while studying under various artists in multiple cultures. In 2015, Dara Illustrated the children’s book, When Santa’s Hat Fell From the Sky by Liz Bryde, which won a Bronze Moonbeam Award. Her paintings and drawings have been shown in multiple venues in solo and group shows in Paris and New York including The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in Paris, and The Invisible Dog Art Center and The Ground Floor Gallery in Brooklyn NY. Dara’s work can be found in private collections in North America and Europe. 

My work searches for the extraordinary in the ordinary, the beautiful in the ugly, and the meaning in the meaningless. It speaks of relationships through a metaphorical microscope portraying what I find with muted palettes, a spiritual tone and a bit of playfulness.  My recent work is a reaction the changing dynamics of interpersonal relationships as seen, experienced and influenced by media and technology in America.  It plays with cliche’ and preconceived ideas of family, love and romance by combining drawings with abstracted photographs of objects within the domestic setting in order to create images that highlight the discord between what is imagined and what is real. Drawing on my training as a representational painter, my earlier paintings of rocks embody a similar aesthetic and play with the traditional conceptions of the still life by rejecting the use of symbolic objects and instead using neutral objects’ relationships to one another and within space as a metaphor for human relationships.  The significance of the work is open to the viewer to interpret, similar to a Rorschach test.  Ultimately the paintings reveal more about the viewer than the reverse.