Diana Dorenzo

Diana Dorenzo began drawing and painting as a child on her family’s farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. As a young alumnus of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, she took to the road and painted her way from Nova Scotia to Key West, Florida, tasting the spray off the Atlantic Ocean. Her footprints were frequently found on Eastern beaches intersecting with the ineluctable questions of youth, life, and art.

Her long journey of self-discovery would inevitably follow the sun to the coastal redwoods and rock-strewn shorelines of Northern California and the misted harbors and muscular clouds that mantel the Pacific Northwest. These travels have forged in her work both a vagabond spontaneity and a mature and intense mis-en-place.

Diana is a gypsy. Art is her language and her palette is one of powerful atmospherics, a tempest of bold strokes and rich colors revolving around a calm eye of nuance and mood. Always, there is the kiss of fleeting light on the flow of water and time…and her signature paradox of utterly simple composition expressing enormous force.

Her current work fuses meditation and intellect, drilling down then letting go—a zen-like display of sublime skill and balance. Hers is an artistic vision that trades the accessible for the possible, spins ethereals from the essential.

“Intrinsic to my art is my belief that the journey is more important than the destination,” she says, “My mind sees paintings that I hope my hands can map.”

Driven by an affinity for deep water and pristine light, Diana divides her time between Maui and the San Juan Islands, where she continues to decipher the world within through the visual reality around her. Her studio is in Kula, her soul is in her work.