Danielle Beirne Artist Bio – Artisans in the Loop

 

Danielle Beirne is a St. Louis-based Illustrator from Wildwood, MO, with a BFA undergraduate degree in Illustration and a minor in English from Webster University. Having recently graduated in 2020 during a tumultuous year, Danielle’s illustrative work grew and shifted to match these times, drawing deeper from her narratively driven work and using it to not only inspire others but draw us closer together. She does so through complex visual narratives or sometimes captures these emotions or moments on something as simple as a folding fan.

 

At home in Wildwood, she loves books, writing, and craves knowledge in general. When not illustrating, you can often find her curled up with a book or writing poetry, short stories, or ekphrastic insights into art history. Her love and passion for narrative and stories that center around the human condition and explore the nature of memory is always a main driving factor behind her work. She thanks her passion for art history, a quirky love of cartography, and a special fondness for mythology for many of the inspirational insights that inform and drive her artwork. Because of this, she has been described as a classical virtuoso of sorts, beyond Illustration, writing, and studying history and art history, she practices calligraphy, dabbles in singing and performing folkloric and operatic music, and has played the violin for 14 years. She owes her interests, passions, and pursuits for the power behind a lot of her illustrations as well as the theory behind her work ethic and the message in her art.    

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Danielle has applied these principles and passions in her digital submissions to the International Zealous Competition in 2019; the “After Dark” BFA Online Exhibition for the Webster University Arcade Contemporary Art Projects Digital Gallery her graduating year 2020, which displays her BFA Senior Thesis; and the dPICTUS Unpublished Picturebook Showcase for 2020.

 

Artist Statement: “Narrative is the binding thread throughout all of my work: the translating of written narrative into narrative art. My goal is never to simply depict what the text says, whether it’s from my own personal written work or someone else’s, but to evoke the emotion and feeling that the text lends you and create a new narrative from it, a visual one.

 

We are all looking for something, to leave a lasting memory of ourselves on the world through our narratives to fight the obscurity, mortality, and eventual end that is life. In my work, I explore this concept, trying to give back to the narratives we have fought so hard to preserve and those we have fought so hard to create. Writing, like illustration, is constantly telling new stories. The trick is to learn how to breathe life into them anew.”