Artist Bio

DK Byrd is an artist based out of the Bay Area, California. As a self-taught artist, DK has over the years has learned and developed a craft of using graphite, gouache and oil paints as her mediums of choice, and manipulates them on various types of surfaces to create unique pieces that convey deep messages. Her work has progressed from painting with watercolours as a child to drawing the long landscapes and storytelling faces she saw whilst on the road travelling to her every day studies and pieces now influenced by the dark and beautiful times of her childhood. DK’s works conjure her own analogies of life, death and the human condition through floral language (floriography) and metaphoric symbolisms to saturate our minds and leave the audience guessing what is to come after.

Her passion and focus through her art is to bring awareness about our world, it’s wonder and troubles paralleled to express the pains and joys of her journey from youth to adulthood. Her objective is to open her audience’s eyes with flower meanings that bloom from her muses sight to thought-provoking objects placed strategically within her pieces. Her imagery makes your mind think beyond the piece itself and it’s relations to our lives here and now. DK hopes that with each piece created it will help bring us closer together as individuals and shed a limelight to the appreciation of our natural environment and it preservation. Her work as her voice, DK brings awareness to the acceptance of invisible illnesses, transparency and advocacy for human rights, and much more.

Artist Statement

The body of work that the artist Danika Kristine [DK] delivers is a dynamic exploration of emotion and beauty. Her use of colors and fine detail stirs the passions of the observer. Paving a way for an open dialogue that she provokes with the focus of women’s power.

The ethereal aesthetic that characterizes the artist’s portfolio makes a return. The frantic application of paint paired with very precise imagery mirrors the personality of the artists. DK Byrd draws inspiration from her life and experiences. We are gifted with a punctuated departure of the omitted eye that defines the artist’s style. Blooming petals and washes of oil paint almost violently placed usurping the usual space we have come to expect on beautiful portraits of heroines. The observer is left with more questions than answers through the experience that is the presence of these pieces. It is equal parts amusement and admiration for the skill and intellect that defines the art of DK.
The expressions on the faces explore painful longing and sorrow. Juxtaposed with a surreal landscape of color and nuanced symbolism the tone of the work is haunting.

Coming into her own the artist shows mastery of mixed mediums and restraint in the new direction of her work. DK has proved to be a budding figure in the Bay Area art scene with an eye on the top. (Artist Review for Sanchez Contemporary, 2016)
DK’s work have appeared in large art events like Coachella Music and Arts Festival, to small art shows frequented in West Coast and has donated pieces to organisations close to her heart, such as More Than A Cone and Planned Parenthood‘s iDEFY campaign. Her goal is to travel the world meeting other artists that inspire her and create more art for others to see/feel.

DK currently lives and works in the Bay Area where she can be found surrounded by walls covered by art that inspired her, drawers of paints, baskets of various plants, graffiti zines, a good cup of coffee and her devoted cat companion “assistant”, Kittan, by her side.