"I started adding mystical elements to my paintings to represent what each object means to me.", Diane White
Diane White is a contemporary American painter based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and best known for the still lifes she paints in the idiom she calls magical realism. She came to painting after many years of working as a potter and trained in oil at the Denver Art Students League and the Loveland Art Academy in Colorado, where she chose still life as her primary subject. Her mature paintings combine traditional still-life draftsmanship, careful observation of light, value, and the surface of ceramic, glass, lacquer, and porcelain, with the introduction of small fantastical elements that displace the everyday object into an imaginative register.
Her subjects are drawn from a personal collection of Asian and other ceramic vessels assembled over many years, porcelain bowls, lacquer boxes, vases, teapots, each carrying its own associations and quietly invested with story. She has been juried into the Associated Artists Annuals at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Hoyt Regional, the MidAtlantic Juried shows, and the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art Biennial, and into national competitions including those of the Oil Painters of America, the Salon International, the National Oil and Acrylic Painters' Society, and the American Women Artists. In 2013 she received the Donna Hollen Bolmgren Award at the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh's 102nd Juried Exhibition.