Deym Painter - Providence, RI Deym Providence, RI URL1: www.deym.com URL2: myspace.com/painterwritercontemporary      Lana Deym Campbell signs her name simply as Deym, her signature since the 70’s, when collection of her paintings began. Her earliest artistic influence was her family. On her mother’s side, her great uncle was Hans Skramlik von Cronreuth was a 19th Century painter whose realist work hangs at the National Gallery in Prague. On her father’s side, another great uncle, Rene d’Harnoncourt, was the first Director of the first Museum of Modern Art, in NYC. The classical world of art attracted Lana, as she loved drawing, but the intellectual concepts of modern art also challenged her. Marcel Duchamp further intrigued her, for most in the modern art world had accepted his premise that art was “concrete philosophy.” An empty frame could be art. The family debates circled their wagons around questions of quality, value and, ultimately, what is art. These conflicts between the art worlds challenged her to find a way to consolidate her views. To integrate these views she studied art history, formal philosophy, the Mysticism of Eastern and Western religions, Kung Fu, and simultaneously kept up with developments in the sciences, mainly biology and physics. Through kung fu styled meditation, she lets her intuition guide her brush, her skills and insights and the subconscious communicates through her fingers in a more profound and faster way than anything she could do consciously. She dubs her philosophical work, “Transcendental Romantic Realism."      “Human senses receive billions of electrical impulses; if it were not for an interior pre-wired capability of organizing this entire atomic flood, the world would appear a colorless, chaotic scramble. If this reality is a dream within a dream or a hologram, as modern physicists theorize, it has a higher purpose, for reality has embedded mystic messages of wisdom. Just the simple act of looking at the manner in which light shapes and shadows the forms of a face can be a wonder. Philosophers such as Lao Tzu developed whole philosophies from observing nature. There is beauty and unity to be observed and recorded throughout reality that captures our emotions and stills our minds.” Collectors often place her philosophical insights together with each painting.      Exposure of many cultures and diverse values also contributed to her philosophical and artistic consolidation. Born as Countess Svietlana (Lana) L.B.M.J. Deym von Stritez, she is a scion of a rare feudal Czech/Austrian European family, of a documented lineage by the Gotha Almanac since the 13th Century. She grew up in Venezuela, Colombia, Germany and the US, and later, lived in England. She experienced the diverse values of these cultures, in politics, ideologies, manners and tastes. It forced her to review the challenges of each culture and this laid the foundation for her universal transcendental philosophical outlook that would encompass art, to bridge and transcend warring factions in all aspects. She attended Marymount, and later, the National Academy of Fine Art, NYC from 1976 to 1979, where she studied oils with renowned painters Harvey Dinnerstein and Colleen Browning. She received diplomas for Drawing, Anatomy and Painting. There she excelled, wining all the top prizes, including the Dr. Ralph Weiler Prize and the William Auerbach-Levy Prize, judged by well known artists and critics. Later she took private lessons with Burt Silverman, known for his Time magazine covers and then moved to Italy to study the Old Masters.      Lana has shown in NYC at the National Academy, the National Arts Club and at the Kish Galleries. In RI, she has shown at the Bert Gallery and through Lenore Gray. Her works have hung at the Newport Art Museum in RI, and at the Kitzbuhel Schloss Kaps, in Austria and are the Kish Galleries in NYC, who represent her work. Sotheby’s evaluated her paintings and included them in their first online auction in the summer of 2001. More recently her work was exhibited in the PAC Gallery at the Blackstone Visitor Center (show continues through February 25th) and received great press (front page, 2nd story lead in The Times, Jan. 19, 2007),where her work was compared to John S. Sargent's) Her paintings are in many international private collections including that of Borden Stevenson, Idaho, son of the famous Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson of Illinois; Lady Alexandra Hay, England; Countess Astrid Lamberg, Spain; Baron Stefan von Breisky, Portugal; the Law Offices of Cowan, Leibowitz & Latman, NYC; Gilbert Videau of Paris and NYC, among others.      Lana comments: “Painting, writing, music, physics, philosophy even psychiatry have similar ends, the pursuit of integration, the search for unity. Nothing moves, heals or empowers humans more than the lyrical glimpse of an underlying unity that transcends the seemingly chaotic and disconnected reality that is presented by our senses.”