An Oasis for Creativity
AboutDiana
Diana Stelin is an award-winning landscape artist and educator, author and fashion designer. Her lush, layered, shimmering gold leaf, oil and wax pieces are featured in dozens of private and corporate collections. Her interviews can be found in Boston Globe, HyperAllergic, Huffington Post, Mother Nature Network among others.
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“I admire the expression Diana achieves through her energized marks. They animate each painting and really bring them to life. They are very well painted and capture not just an interesting cross between the actual and the abstracted, but really provide a sense of place with quite positive energy.” Elizabeth Erdreich White Fine Art: Corporate Art Consultant
Her sense of color and tone rivals that of the Modern Masters. Her compositions flirt with fantasy yet somehow keep two feet planted firmly on the ground. Caroline Cox, Fine Art Consultant, Salem, MA
"So grounding! All the while the wind is blowing in so many directions and there is such fervor in every day these days - but the center is there holding it all together! Art can give strength. This is proof." Petra, Brookline
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bio
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Founder of the Flow Method, and recipient of Best of Boston award, Diana Stelin is on a mission to reduce Burnout through Creativity - the topic of the Ted talk she presented in March'22. Her pieces are in private and corporate collections nationwide.
Diana's life of creative exploration began when she was 13. Her family relocated from Moldova to Bloomfield, New Jersey and she enrolled in an art class. Through her difficult teenage years, she found solace in expressing herself through creating art. Her BFA degree at Cornell University was followed by a MS at Boston University, where she continued to develop a unique free-flowing painting style. After graduation, she managed the world-renowned DTR Modern Galleries. She subsequently founded The Plein-Air Art Academy, and received a Best of Boston Award for kids' art classes.
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She published a highly acclaimed novel about the importance of art for our psyche, and in recent years has presented a TedX talk on using creativity to fight burnout, appeared as a guest on multiple podcasts, wrote a children’s book, founded a clothing line based on her art, and exhibited her work at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
She lives in the Boston area but her pieces are in corporate and private collections worldwide, and she uses her expertise in her proprietary flow processes as a consultant in creative corporate workshops and talks.
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technique
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Stelin paints multilayered palette knife landscapes in oil and cold wax, which she partially melts with a heating lamp to dissolve different objects on canvas into one another. The drips are her signature element: the dark ones are emotional strokes that create grids within a painting. The lighter ones are semitransparent, and partially show the layers of paint beneath them.
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Stelin's technique is a dance between realistic and abstract landscapes, between watercolor and oil techniques. She begins with a watercolor in plein-air. Stelin subsequently translates the drawing to canvas in the same expressive manner adopted for the initial watercolor painting, employing an impasto technique of oils mixed with cold wax.
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The last and most rewarding part of the process is the melting of wax. It comes as a 4th or 5th layer of the painting. It requires patience, has an element of surprise, yet can be controlled, and it connects various sections of the unique oil on canvas. Because it's a textured layer on top of other layers, it breaks down lines between subjects, and literally melts one state into another. It also creates mini compositions within a painting, so that your eye always wanders around the canvas and catches new nuances hidden within the layers. At the same time Stelin adds in authentic gold leaf to the now abstract landscape, as well as 3-D sculptural elements.
artist
statement
"We're but a small speck in this universe"
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Diana Stelin's artwork is an exploration of humanity's interaction with the natural world - the attitude of overarching control and distancing, the physical space around us and our perception of it. To what extent can we dissolve into our surroundings and co-exist with the natural world? Stelin's artworks appeal to an audience from varied angles. Their initial reaction to the full compositions brings back expressive Van Gogh and Gauguin landscape explorations.
Past the initial impression, there's a deeper understanding: a more in-depth look into the interaction of man-made and natural forms. The abstract, Richter-influenced patterns emerge. Stand close enough and you see how Stelin expertly catches that moment when a viewer allows herself/himself to truly melt into the surroundings, and when borders break between the sky and the trees, when the architecture blends beautifully into the natural world.
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