Diana Young has a new appreciation for paintings formerly considered “duds.” However, when you view her work, the term dud is the last thing to come to mind. Her colorful, lively paintings and drawings are rife with wild perspective and dance with life. You look at them and can’t help smiling. Viewers often break into a chuckle as they note the sparks of humor that some of them carry.
The dud appreciation was spawned when Diana participated in a swap masterminded by the president of the Bangor Art Society a year or so ago. Member-artists traded one or two of their failures to any willing person.
She recalled, “It was a BLAST! It was so easy to make something out of someone else’s failure that I suddenly had a sense of freedom. Now I’m taking my own hopeless dreadfuls (and I have plenty of those) and reconfiguring them! I’m old enough to give up my ‘pride’ and just make a happy MESS!”
Whether she is reworking a dud or creating something new, Diana likes to turn things around and look at a painting through different lenses; maybe at an angle or in semi- darkness. Or while working on a painting she might leave it on her easel upside down so that when she returns to it, she can see right away what needs to be fixed. It allows her to not worry about the subject matter.
She says “Once I start worrying about subject matter the thing falls into a certain category of general boredom and it's been a gradual process through my life of shaking off the dependence on realism.”
The same thing happens when she pulls out an older painting. She can look at it with new eyes and says, “Bang! I know how to fix it.”
Diana begins her artmaking by drawing. She describes herself as “a line person," and notes, "the transition from line into color sometimes is difficult. I have no idea where I'm going with the color because if I try to just copy nature it gets boring fast. There's sort of a hiatus in every artwork I do that goes into color but then gradually it starts happening and one thing leads to another.”
It seems that Diana captures life itself as she draws. It is almost as if she isn’t just observing, she is absorbing it through her hands and into her brain. When it comes back out onto paper or canvas the perspective is “gaga,” as Diana calls it, reflecting action versus actual structure. A bit from Costa Rico might pop into a scene from Stonington, Connecticut, or a chicken might hop into a drawing of New Haven.
One of her favorite drawing opportunities occurred when cruising on the Rhine and Danube rivers. Hauling three large sketchbooks along with her, she was able to sit on the top deck for hours and draw what was going by as the ship slowly wound through all the towns and places.
Did Diana begin life with a crayon in her hand? Almost! When she was very little her mother would get out the crayons and paper to keep her busy and out of trouble. She loved to draw and draw while listening to the radio. Even at boarding school as a young teen she hid in her bunk drawing while other young ladies were out horseback riding or dancing or playing sports. Really, she just wanted to go home. In an effort to convince her to stay they offered to get her an art teacher. She said no thank you.
Diana was already wise to art teachers. Her art teacher in elementary school was big on having the class draw from plaster cast models. She was also big on criticism and wanted the young artists to draw in a certain style … one that Diana didn’t find particularly impressive. You don’t get anything more uninspiring than models made from plaster.
Thankfully, Diana’s appreciation for lively subject matter was already springing up and her enthusiasm for doing art … in her own way … wasn’t quashed. With encouragement from her mother, who wanted to support her daughter’s passion and also make sure she had a way to support herself, if that became necessary, she attended a summer program at Rhode Island Schools of Design. Then at age 17 she graduated from high school and in the fall returned to the college to major in illustration.
She describes her time there as the “happiest years I ever spent” although she quickly changed her major. She maintained that the illustration course was “So boring. All he wanted us to do to start with is to make pastiches of other famous illustrators in the past … to copy their technique. I've written my own stories and illustrated them, but I didn't have the feeling for illustrating other people's work.” She dove into her painting major with enthusiasm (for her work and her teachers) and hasn’t looked back.
Diana carved her own path as an artist and the stories she tells with her paintings and drawings fill the viewer with delight and discovery. Her paintings may not be realist in style, but they very much capture real life.