PAINTINGS OIL PASTELS PRISMACOLOR PENCIL ARTIST STATEMENT

Background

In 1999, Diane Belfiglio began working on a series of paintings based on national historic monuments and buildings. She completed four series of paintings from northeast Ohio, which included images from the National First Ladies Historic Site and the McKinley National Memorial, both in Canton, Ohio; historic Zoar, Ohio; and President Garfield's residence in Mentor, Ohio. She then traveled to other locations to continue her study of national historic monuments and buildings.

In 2007, Belfiglio began working in oil pastels. Her first drawings included images from historic Jamestown and Mount Vernon in Virginia. As her drawings progressed, Belfiglio became more intrigued with the organic elements of her images, which were more aptly expressed with oil pastel than the architectural ones. This development has led to her newest floral images.

ACRYLIC ON CANVAS PAINTINGS

My paintings prominently feature closely-cropped, sunlit architectural forms. Although realistic in their presentation, I rely heavily on their underlying abstract qualities to give to the already imposing images an even greater sense of power. Shadows, ethereal by nature, take on a rigid structural aspect in these compositions. Colors range from brilliant to subtle in an effort to reproduce the strong sense of sunlight streaming through each piece.

Although these images are visually powerful, the delicate details in the architecture—and often in the surrounding vegetation--are also prominently featured in my work. The resultant blend produces a heightened, stylized reality. I work to transform the mundane into the extraordinary, so that we see beauty in images that generally go unnoticed by most of us on a daily basis.

OIL PASTEL DRAWINGS

My art has undergone many changes and much exploration over the past two years. I have transitioned from painting large, hard-edged acrylic paintings to drawing smaller, more intimate oil pastel drawings. This new work is still firmly grounded in the same formalist ideas that have interested me since my beginnings as a professional artist: closely cropped images bathed in the play of pattern between sunlight and shadows. The concept remains the same, however, the medium and images have changed.

When I first began working in oil pastels in 2008, I returned to a more formalist, abstract approach to my realistic images, a throw back to my very early work done in graduate school. The photographs I took at the Jamestown archeological site lent themselves perfectly to more simplified compositions; hence the inception of the Jamestown Geometry series. This was followed by more formalist work, the Potomac Patterns series, which depicts streamlined images from the pier at Mount Vernon.

However, as I continued with more architectural images--the Mount Vernon Memories series--it became obvious that architecture is more amenable to acrylic paint than it is oil pastels. Organic images seemed to speak to oil pastels in a much more powerful way. I decided to step back from the architecture for a while and began experimenting with floral images--although some elements of architecture still exist in these floral pieces. For me, this transition to florals has been the most surprising transformation of all. Yet, I have become strangely possessed by these images and intend to follow them as they lead me into my next transition.