Diane Cherry
Diane Cherr is a printmaker and painter from New York City now residing in Westchester County. Women’s empowerment, personal traditions and interpretations of stories and legends are prominent themes in her work. Her prints and other works pull from personal histories, mementos and storytelling. Works feature intriguing, well-informed interpretations of iconography and symbology, joyously expressed as playful images with important ties to her heritage.
Her portfolio also includes collages and drawings, inspired by patterns, narrative and whimsy. Colorful works are created in small editions and as unique prints. She introduces and elevates items from her family, such as vintage fashion accessories, into universal symbols of femininity in combination with objects, including hamsas, lunar cycles, water and pomegranates, long established symbols associated with Jewish heritage, traditions and mysticism. Diane often looks to Judaic scholars and women of the Bible and Torah, as she creates her art. She is greatly influenced by quilt motifs and their rich storytelling history.
I’m playing with what can happen inside and outside variations on themes as they continue to reconfigure over time. My process comes out of a love of pattern, still life, antiquities, and the underlying passion for color. The basic premise is beauty, making the world beautiful because the world is not always beautiful. Combining images requires a separate printing for each step. Every color impacts the composition as the layers build. What will happen when I play with and overlay different colors as several things happen at once? Structure, deconstruction, repetition, and layering is playful, improvisational, and full of surprises. There is an element of mystery andI can depend on printmaking to give me back a result that I couldn't have seen at the beginning.
Squaring the Flower series are bright, bold silkscreen prints inspired by the ancient Greek idea of “squaring the circle,” as an expression of balance and beauty. Formal qualities of color interaction and a sense of geometrical playfulness. These prints can exist independently or hang together to make a wall-length frieze, encompassing a spirit of experimentation and expanded logic. Transparent and opaque color blocks shield and reveal delicate, illustrative line drawings of flowers, creating contrasts of fragile and strong, intense, and subdued. Transforming the still life form of a flower in a vase, into dynamic, modern imagery is created by balancing between decorative Victorian art, as characterized by ornate shapes and patterns, and modernism, with its bold forms and bright colors. The flower gets stripped away, covered up and over-printed, yet it always finds a way back in, like a melodious refrain or a cherry blossom in springtime. Shifting 19th century two-point perspective into a single-point, aerial perspective by flattening the image and seeing it from above, is the genesis for the “Squaring the Flower” which has become in-depth exploration of color on a large scale."