Diana Marta

Artist

"The time is there, but the impetus can be challenged by overall health concerns, as well as inability to do the income work necessary to support life."

Describe yourself as a maker/artist/creative

An artist who has supported my studio by teaching credit classes at Universities and Colleges for over 30 years, I now teach and mentor students at my Ellicott City location. Exhibiting and being awarded for drawing, oil, watercolor, installation, and digital animation, I have also curated well received regional exhibits.

What are you currently working on?

Most recently working from the gesture life model with short, active poses as the basis of figuration, I also was interested in facial expression.

Has your work shifted in response to the pandemic? How?

Quarantine during Covid months has changed the availability of everything. Adapting to having no models and being “safe” in work space corners at home, I chose to focus on small scale faces. The faces of people finally speaking out, thinking, sleeping, laughing provide insightful connections to our own feelings. And text has become a frequent inclusion. Quarantine made a lot of faces available on television.

I miss being with other people and unwittingly surrounded myself with face works in progress. Cutting stencils from the value shapes and contours of my own watercolor paintings, I could make multiples quickly. Resolving them as variations takes more time. But during the totally intense time of developing each painting, it becomes a personal companion for the duration of its resolution and possibly beyond.

In your opinion, what is the role that the creative process can play in helping us confront our “new” reality?

I see the art process partially as response to changing reality and making sense of the current experience. The isolation means that there is more time for creative work.

Any other insights?

The time is there, but the impetus can be challenged by overall health concerns, as well as inability to do the income work necessary to support life. And I am now financially in danger of losing my studio because the landlord is not making fair policy adjustments to the crippling Covid situation.

To see more of Diana's work, visit her website.