Typewriters, Doll Houses, Dogs, Descendants

Diane Fitch: Paintings and Drawings

Saturday, January 6 – Sunday, February 11, 2024

I fall in love with certain objects and build paintings around them. Their juxtaposition can imply a narrative, depending on the viewer’s associations. 

The paintings in the Little Fallen Man series each contain a transcription of a masterwork, by Caravaggio, Brueghel, or Géricault, that served as an initial jumping off point. While I want the space to be palpable and forms to be solid, I am not interested in trompe l’oeil. I want the material of paint to be evident, and, to a greater or lesser extent, for the process of making to be part of the subject, the painting caught in the act of becoming. 

I work in series, each painting suggesting the next. Paintings of family members in interior spaces speak to my daily life as an ongoing motif; my entire house serves as my studio. Of concern as I work is what hides beneath the representation of recognizable objects: the call and response of directional moves, repeated shapes, color orchestration. 

–Diane Fitch

Diane Fitch grew up in Vermont. She received her BFA from the Portland School of Art and her MFA from Indiana University in Bloomington. She lived for many years in Yellow Springs, Ohio, teaching painting and drawing at Wright State University, and in Italy at the university’s summer studio abroad program which she founded with colleague Glen Cebulash. She now lives in Vermont and Maine.