Esther Deans was raised in an artistic family, and learned the skills of observational painting from her grandfather, the landscape painter Austen Deans and her uncle, the figure painter, Lindsay Crooks.  She studied English and Philosophy at Victoria University, Wellington, and worked as an English teacher for several years before making painting a career focus.

Esther recently completed her Master of Visual Arts, and PhD at Auckland University of Technology. Her research was a personal investigation into her experiences and preoccupations, including ideas about time, literature, art history, memory, and nature.

In her works she draws on novels, films, and everyday structures to create an iconography that responds to personal and collective events. Her paintings appear amorphous, spectre-like and indistinct, gradually emerging from multiple paint layers. Art history, literature, time, nature, religion and memory feed into Deans’ practice, which is personal yet also posits a deep engagement with the surrounding world. 

The source images for paintings can be mined from the internet, stills from film and television broadcasts, or photographs Deans took herself. They are then stripped of their fidelity to inhabit an alternative reality.

available works