The City Arts Gallery at City College of San Francisco is pleased to host an exhibition of paintings by Diane Stevens that explores the aesthetics and definition of landscape painting.

The artist states:
My work is chiefly concerned with the communication of private experience to its public audience. My paintings are constructs that deal with the effect of memory in relation to observed fact: place.

The Italian Walls series grew out of an earlier attempt to rework landscape. In the prior pieces, I had neutralized the picture plane, using a square format, in order eliminate reference to landscape painting, which is most typically done in a horizontal format. I employed a single line, to indicate a horizon. It was a fruitful painting experience and led to The Italian Walls.

The walls came about during a visit to Italy whereupon I began to focus on my memories of the texture of the ancient Roman walls that abound. What impressed me was the confluence of nature and the man-made world. Old walls have lichen, fungi, moss, and other living elements embedded in them. I found all of these elements interesting enough to want to mimic this activity in paint on canvas.

I set to work troweling paint onto square canvasses, then added dry oils from old palettes to create texture, essentially “gluing” paint on paint. These paintings have been reworked many times. I’ve pushed my oils straight from the tubes at times to fill spaces. On other occasions I’ve “re-plastered” areas, much as a builder might to fix surface damage; sometimes I’ve distressed surfaces with the intent of copying natural forces. I’ve also used heightened color, and at times added a bit of graffiti-like marking to lend more interest to the pieces.

I think of my work as reality-based fiction rendered in the language of paint. My goal is to use this particular language to communicate “reality” more directly than I am able to using the written or spoken word.