Diane Neville (Born 1938) is a portrait artist who has painted pets, families and celebrities including the Smothers Brothers, Tom Jones, and Sammy Davis Jr. adding to her career a total of more than 20,000 portraits. Diane does not paint landscapes; she concentrates on and studies the human form in its human condition of life. Neville Knowles worked at an advertising agency early in her career but she got fed up with the “Mad Men” lifestyle and after a couple of martini lunches she gave a two-week quit notice to the firm and set out to become a portrait artist.
For Diane, the ability to paint a person honestly and brings out something in a painting that shows a deeper emotional element is important. The person may be thoughtful, pensive or radiant and it’s her duty to bring that out. Diane’s painting brings out the person the way they are, she doesn’t make them look prettier or younger than they are. It took Neville Knowles thousands of portraits before she started to see the emotion inside the portrait of a human. She started by doing her own portraits. She has created 48 self-portraits using a mirror. She believes that once a person can do self portrait perfectly, they can do anything.
When you commission Neville to create your portrait, she will start out with several of your photographs, lay them on the floor and begin to remove them one by one until she has the photo that she feels captures your inner light. She uses the oil technique employed by classic traditional artists. It takes her six months to create a portrait, less time if she’s doing a watercolor or pastel portrait.
