Diane Belfiglio - Artist Statement (September 11, 1956 - March 25, 2023)
I love summer. The earth is warm, flowers bloom, the days are long, and sunshine prevails. Summer is the season that inspires my art. In selecting the pieces for this retrospective exhibit representing 30 years of work, I realized just how much of summer’s intense light and color is captured in my past work, and continues to shine in my newest work, like musical threads echoing throughout a larger symphony.
No matter the subject or medium, my work is firmly grounded in the 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. Although realistic in presentation, I rely heavily on the underlying abstract qualities of my forms. Shadows, ethereal by nature, take on a rigid structural aspect in my compositions. Colors range from brilliant to subtle in an effort to reproduce the strong sense of sunlight streaming through each piece. My goal is 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.
