Diane Novetsky: On the Cusp
New Paintings & Prints
Center Gallery and Project Space
March 5–30, 2025
Press Release
Opening Reception: Friday, March 7, 5–8pm
Diane Novetsky, Back to the Garden, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 36x60 in.
In Diane Novetsky’s first exhibition as a Kingston Gallery Member, she presents a new body of work that centers around curvilinear forms—circles and spheres that serve as celestial bodies, sources of light, architectural fragments, and constellations. These shapes, both serpentine and biomorphic, evoke the female form, suggesting sensuality, while the circular forms represent the continuity of life and the cyclical nature of existence. Through geometry in its most iconic form, Novetsky’s work becomes an abstract narrative, where these forms take on roles as characters, revealing stories of their creation.
Novetsky’s saturated color palette is influenced by Italian Renaissance painters who used high-key color and bold shapes to describe their subjects. Novetsky uses modern equivalents of these pigments like ultramarine blue, violet-infused burgundy, earthy red oxides, sunny yellow ochres, and warm blacks, along with contemporary pigments like burnished bronze, pinks, and greenish golds. Her “color family” and shape language share loving links with the past, yet renew movement, sensuality, and freedom.
Novetsky’s forms bend, twist, and rotate, creating a sense of space that is both fluid and flat. Through this playful contradiction, she invites the viewer to explore the boundless possibilities of form and color. Her paintings aim to express the fullness of life, offering an experience of joy, contemplation, and energy.
Her process is intuitive and meditative. Often starting with a simple colored-pencil sketch, she makes numerous adjustments as the painting evolves. Her style is adventurous, with a sense of both earth and sky, evoking an energy that animates the world around us.
Along with her acrylic paintings, Novetsky offers a series of aquatint moonscape prints in the Project Space—a new medium she is exploring. This series echoes the curvilinear forms of her work on canvas, but is both textural and tonal, an interesting contrast to the paintings.
The title On the Cusp refers to the crescent moon, an arc-like symbol of femininity and empowerment, as well as the threshold between the present and the future. This exhibit offers a glimpse into new possibilities, revealing paths yet to be fully explored.
Artist Bio
Diane Novetsky’s work has been widely exhibited in New England, including at the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, the Mosesian Art Center, the Danforth Museum of Art, Tufts University Aidekman Gallery, the Boston Convention Center, and the Southern Vermont Art Center. She has also shown in group exhibitions at The Painting Center in New York and Mark Borghi Fine Arts in Sag Harbor, New York. This is her first exhibit as a member of Kingston Gallery in Boston. Her work has been published in Artscope, Art New England, the Boston Globe, and Boston Voyager. Novetsky is a founding member of the Brickbottom Artists Community in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she lives.