Beauty permeates the petals of a rose or the folds of a dress with an ineffable aura. Like the scent of perfume, it lifts the spirits and stirs sensations imbued with personal associations.   The 1950s cocktail dresses and sun frocks in Dianne Gall's paintings belonged to strangers, their true history unknowable.  She imagines one being worn to a first formal, another to a first date.  They remain as a mute but eloquent testimony to a secret past, redolent with associations of feminine allure and the social decorum of another era. 

The artist has said that for her inanimate objects are not inanimate, for they carry a history and a memory.  The dresses and teacups portrayed in her still-life tableaux signify an idealised past - that of Australia in the 1950s, before she was born, a country in love with modernity and full of hope for the future.   Afternoon tea was a polite ritual where keeping up appearances meant sweeping anything unpleasant under the carpet.  This was the world of her grandmother, whose love of plants and gardening inspired in Gall a passion for painting flowers, elegant clothes, and exquisitely decorated teacups.   It is a lost feminine world that can only be retrieved through art.

Dianne Gall paints dresses tailored to flatter the feminine form – cut low to expose a hint of breast, plunging to reveal an elegant back, tight at the bodice and then flowing in folds from the waistline.  But the dresses are not worn; the female body is an absent presence.  Instead each dress is displayed as an exhibit, on headless dressmaker's mannequins, juxtaposed against a baby blue sky with scudding cotton-wool clouds.  Beautiful flowers float past surreally.  There is the artifice of the dream in this mis-en-scene – a beautiful, unobtainable dream.  The semblance of happiness in portraying beautiful things and femininity is tinged with an underlying tristesse of unconsummated desire. 

The artist is acutely aware that the world is not necessarily beautiful.  During the day she is immersed in a very different reality to the world of her paintings.  She works as a librarian in a television newsroom, filing footage daily of the world's disasters, atrocities, and human suffering.  After work and at weekends she returns to the studio to paint. Here the rest of life is screened out.  The studio is lit from above by a skylight and has no windows.  It is filled with the objects of her passion for collecting and the props for her paintings. There are shelves of delicate porcelain teacups, collected from second hand shops or given to her by friends, and a row of brightly glazed fifties vases.  Dressmaker's mannequins adorned with frocks crowd together in a group. All around are canvases in various states of completion.

In preparing her paintings, Dianne Gall constructs a still-life tableau using props she has collected.  She then photographs exactly what she plans to paint and grids up the canvas to reproduce the outlined layout of the composition.  Once this initial preparation is complete, she is able to work quickly and intuitively.  Applying the paint with loose, gestural stroke she renders the semblance of sensuous folds of fabric, the sheen of satin, the delicate pink petals of an artificial corsage, the gleam of porcelain.  Mimesis in Greek art was not the slavish mimicry of appearances but rather sought to reveal the essential form and truth of the object or person portrayed.   Gall works rapidly, seeking spontaneity to bring out the life of the object rather than to depict it with forensic naturalism.

It is this painterly quality that holds the gaze.  Gradually as one draws closer the verisimilitude of the image dissolves into the abstraction of paint; then the image coheres again as the viewer steps further back.    There is a formal balance in the centred, flat composition of each image that allows the gaze to meander, instead of being directed by visual devices such as perspective.  This induces a more relaxed, reflective mode of perception that suits the artist's poetic intent. 
 
The first paintings of Dianne Gall's dress series were exhibited in Adelaide in 2001.  Prior to that she painted a purely decorative series of single flowers, magnified in scale, and there was the nostalgic humour of Frog Cakes, based on Balfours' iconic green-iced cake that many South Australians associate with happy childhood memories.  Each frog cake was given its own personality and expression.  Similarly with her dresses, Gall is starting to evolve personalities based on the style of the dress.   For her the pink dress with crossover bodice suggests glamour, and possibly bitchiness, while its companion dress in blue has overtones of a lovable Plain Jane.

The teacup series continues the vein of nostalgia for a lost era of decorous afternoon tea parties, while evincing an uncomplicated, feminine joy in decoration.  In her rendition of the intricate ornamentation of the original cups, the artist abstracts the pattern to an impressionistic suggestion of the original.  She delights in juxtaposing differently patterned and textured surfaces, for instance contrasting the porcelain gleam of the mottled green glaze of a teacup with a dappled black and white fake fur background. 

The artifice of art has a different beauty to that of nature. The beauty of the painted rose comes partly from the material poetry of oil paint, from the artist's alchemical command of its viscosity and tonal nuances.  Partly, too, that beauty comes from the viewer's imaginative collusion with the artist in imbuing the painted rose with complex private memories of roses, of gardens where one grew up, of the mother who knew the names of each rose and taught them to her daughter.  The rose is usually conceived as signifying romantic love, but it can also have these associations with a different love, a sharing of feminine pleasures between mother and daughter or between grandmother and grand-daughter.

Dianne Gall's paintings imply that femininity is itself bound up with artifice as symbolised by the stylised dresses and ornamental china of her paintings.  Women get pleasure from this artifice.  It may be that (contrary to theories of femininity as a social construct) women have a deep-rooted, instinctual pleasure in feminine artifice, decoration and beautiful things.  Gall's paintings evince this pleasure, but it is a pleasure tinged with realisation of its own artifice and with an underlying yearning, a desire, for something forever out of reach.