Life & Work with Dana Coyle of Del Rey/Mar Vista

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dana Coyle.

Hi Dana, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My story is about an artist who wasn’t making any art, making it inconsistently or sporadically, or making art she didn’t like to an artist in flow excited by what she creates. I really feel like my story is just beginning, but getting here has been like finding my way home from a different planet.
I think everyone is an artist and being an artist is a way of life. It is particularly essential to my nature and inner identity, and I was just not able to access it in a fulfilling way. I went to school for acting, which I still love and do. It highlighted a pattern that I had with my relationship to my creativity which is: I have to prove my worth to create or have success. It’s a disempowering way to think, and everything I encountered around my creativity reflected that.
During the pandemic, I had a lot of free time, and few obligations due to the restrictions. I have always had many hobbies, and one of them is painting. I don’t have the formal training like I do for other creative mediums, so the imagined standards of expectation or pressure to succeed has never impeded my joy of painting.
I’ve always liked space, stars, aliens, anything cosmic. I’m always looking at those NASA Hubble images, and one day I just thought “I wonder if I could paint one of those”. I went to YouTube and found a kind, enthusiastic art teacher from Alabama who made a short simple demo on painting a nebula.
The first one I did, I finished in an hour. I was elated. Looking at those NASA photos make me so happy to be alive, and suddenly I had found a way to hone my skills to express that feeling. The best art comes from authenticity, and I got stuck trying to fit the mold of what I thought had value instead of honoring what I valued. And oh wow, did that open a wormhole in my life as I continued to create these Nebulae paintings…
I actually sold the first one I ever made last year and was reminded of this lesson again. I just wanted to free some space in my apartment, and I casually sold it to a women who didn’t know I was the artist. When she came to pick it up, she was so excited about it and asked who painted it. When I told her, her jaw dropped and she shouted “Congratulations!” in the middle of the street. It was like watching myself finish the painting again, ecstatic about what I had created. And now it was shared with a complete stranger.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
After my first success, I really took my time with my next painting. I am not a patient, detail oriented, or particularly structured person, but the subject inspired me more than my lack of skills derailed me. The second one took me about three months. And then a third, which I still technically haven’t finished. Then there was a very long break. The world had started to open back up again, and my life cracked open in a way that mirrored the process I found through these paintings. 
Creating felt so easy and natural when it came from a place of deeply desiring to express something meaningful to me, when I made it my priority, and when I had no expectations. When the world opened up again, all of the habits, relationship dynamics, and distractions that did not align with my authenticity came to challenge me again. I confronted A LOT of healing work within myself and the way I was interacting with the world.
I started having vivid dreams two years ago of the starry paintings and so…I painted. I just made it a priority with no goal but to have fun. And my life started to blossom and crumble some more at the same time. I took shorter breaks, and then I kept coming back to painting. It would get me back in my flow. Then I would switch to other creative projects, whatever was exciting me the most, to keep inspiration alive.
This year, it’s been a lot of paintings. I have 3 actively going right now, and I’ve finished 4 in the past 8 months. The next steps keep revealing themselves. I’m excited to share the work I’ve done in an art show, digital prints, and surface design, which is a whole other set of skills I’ve been slowly, at times not so gracefully, gaining. But I’ve been able to approach it with the fun of the original impulse I asked myself- I wonder if I could do this…

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Right now I have two kind of overlapping series going. I paint the Nebulae but I call them “Quantum Nude Self/Other Portraits” because ultimately, we are all made of stardust. So this really is just a couple billion years old portrait. It also makes something so sacred sound kind of saucy, and that’s my favorite combo.

The other series I’ve just done this year kind of combining deep space and an earthly perspective. I haven’t finished it yet, but the overarching subject for the series is about Transformation what it’s like to integrate the earthly experience as an emotional, vulnerable human being with the divine empowerment of a conscious being made of stardust.

What makes you happy?
Obviously painting space makes me happy. It reminds me of the absurdity of being alive- that I am a speck of dust in the universe and I am the entire universe, so I can take the pressure off and trust I’m allowed to follow that what I’m excited about in the present moment will take me where I need to go.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greenteadmc