Artist Statement

We are beings of conscious embodiment, and in that way oil painting can recapitulate our human condition, a construction as we are constructed: stretchers like bones, canvas like fascia, paint layers like skin, images like thoughts, and light like eyes. We look at the painting, and it looks back at us. Sometimes, it sings. Somehow a ghost of our awareness becomes entangled in the paint. 

I love to play with light in the material of oil paint; it never gets old, how paintings can gather, color-shift, and emanate light, and how light evokes conscious awareness, realization, perception, and knowledge. 

These recent oil paintings use cinematic format to explore arial dramas, space operas, musical phrases, and the poetry of light and dark. I invoke the aesthetics of dark beauty in a silent tumult of sparks, smoke, lens flares, stars, and expressive fabric swirls. The fabric drapery (referencing academic painting) here is isolated, allowing it to express movement and emotion lyrically without a narrative setting. It rather literally signifies material embodiment and often looks like tendons, muscles, and figures. I am interested in the revolutionary moment: spirals, the twist, writhing, movement, emergence and disappearance, the clinamen, and catastrophe or eucatastrophe. 

Drawn from images of ecological and social collapse, my photos of suburban verges (and wider explorations of my beloved gothic New England), fireworks, science fiction, space telescope images, poetry, Baroque opera arias, disaster movies, Tolkien's epic The Lord of the Rings, extinction, and revelation, these paintings explore the deep structure and strangeness of our being-in-the-world. Despite their elegiac feeling, these paintings are set aglow, ecstatic with light, color, and movement.

Smook-Pollitt, Sawyer. "A Glow from Within: Dianna Vosburg's Visual Complexity at Kingston." Artscope, March 3, 2022.