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Southbury artist Diane Pfister offers a collection of her oil paintings and pencil and ink drawings capturing the poetic and transcendent qualities of life in her new exhibition continuing through Oct. 6 at Carole Peck's Good News Cafe & Gallery.
Pfister's exhibition, titled "Painting Is Soundless Poetry," brings to Connecticut a collection of evocative, often dreamlike works in oil that have shown in diverse venues in England including Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and prestigious galleries in London, Thornbury Castle, and most recently The Felix hotel in Cambridge.
Pfister's oils on canvas or linen, stretched on wood frames, evoke deep emotions expressed through dynamic and vibrant colors, often balanced with textured rich brown and neutral hues reminiscent of Rembrandt works. The artist cites expressions in her work of the "root" metaphor at the core of the psychological theory of Carl Jung. "References to the body, dress and other forms connect to a substructure of thought and creative expression, as the Jungian root connects us all," she observes.
A graduate of Miami University in Ohio, Pfister pursued postgraduate studies at the Parsons School of Design in New York, the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. She has been a lecturer at art schools and colleges in England and Switzerland and worked commercially in various media including collage, photography and sculpture before settling on a career in painting in 1995.
"It is hard for me to write about 'my work' because when I work, I do not use language, at least not a verbal or written one," Pfister notes. Existing in parallel with the reality of her daily life, she says, "there is the other me who taps into source energy that comes from within, takes over in the privacy of dreams and studio work, and makes it all make sense.
"In some images, I have used the frame of the canvas to provide the boundaries - the ethereal state of being 'there' and the state of 'reality' represented by the wall," she explains. "In other images, I have played with the squared-off spaces to create the timeline of painting: The raw linen exposed in some places, coupled with the finished statement in layers of paint, create an open-ended conversation. The viewer can fill in the blanks, create, and step into the frame and be in her or his own experience."
Pfister has created a series of paintings inspired by the Japanese kimono, a traditional garment that conceals the human form. She uses the kimono as a reference point for her art "because of the lack of relationship it has to the human body," she says.
"Kimonos cloak the body, creating visuals that soar into the sky with birds, meander through forests and waterfalls, and create the illusion of space around the human body. The East found it more important to ignore the surface of the body, while the West obsessed with the figure. It is the difference between the diaphanous, transcendental and intellectual, versus the worldly and secular."
Pfister's striving to express through her works the unspoken inner self has inspired the ethereal works featured in her Good News Cafe exhibition. "Moments of joy, passion and dream state are expressed in color, texture and depth - these words connect to my own feeling of painting," she observes. "It is my hope that viewing these works may trigger in others the sense of floating in that space."
Pfister's paintings are part of private and corporate collections in the United States and Canada, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Australia. Selections from the artist's work may be viewed online in her album of paintings posted on her Web site at www.pfister.co.uk.
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