We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Diana Jensen. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Diana below.

Alright, Diana thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you walk us through some of the key steps that allowed you move beyond an idea and actually launch?

For more than a decade, I have created paintings and installations inspired by vernacular photography. My fascination with ephemera and relics of the past began early, while exploring thrift stores, flea markets, and junkyards with my father. Today, my process still involves searching these places for photographs that hold a strong emotional resonance. My aim is not to replicate these found images literally, but to translate—through paint—what these physical artifacts may have represented to their original owners.

A recent painting project, World Traveler, emerged during the pandemic. The timing of its inception was deeply intertwined with personal experience. After contracting Covid in early 2020, I revisited a collection of hundreds of vintage travel slides I had long kept in storage—images documenting one individual’s lifelong journeys. The idea for the series came almost instantly, and over the next three years, I produced more than 80 paintings inspired by these slides. It was essential to approach the work with care and respect for this anonymous traveler’s visual legacy. The World Traveler series stands both as an homage to one person’s wanderlust and as a quiet reflection on our shared loss of freedom during that time.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Since second grade, I have known that I wanted to be a visual artist. As I mentioned previously, from an early age I was drawn to unconventional sources of visual inspiration through visits to thrift stores, junkyards, and flea markets. These explorations rich with forgotten imagery and discarded objects, have given my work a distinctly populist sensibility.

I was fortunate to study art in Chicago—a city with world-class museums and galleries that showcase significant collections of outsider art. This exposure profoundly shaped my artistic outlook. After earning my MFA from Northwestern University, I attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and soon after relocated to New York City, where I am currently based.

A vital aspect of my practice is a continual experimentation with art materials and techniques. In recent years, I have been painting on transparent surfaces, a direction that began with my World Traveler series and has since evolved into my current painting project, Epic Journey. In this work, I explore how imagery from multiple travel locations can merge into layered compositions created on multiple sheets of transparent Mylar. Using oil paint on acetate and plexiglass, I examine how disparate memories and experiences blur and coalesce within the mind. The transparency of these materials echoes the photographic processes of my source imagery, producing a dissolving, ethereal quality that evokes both memory and history.

Rather than following a conventional formula for making art, each of my painting series evolves its own distinctive materials and techniques—developed to complement the specific content of the found source material

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Rescuing discarded photographs from the dustbin of history fuels my creative purpose. Especially now, as the analog era of photography has largely become obsolete, I find meaning in preserving even a small fragment of imagery. Photography has always been a fugitive medium, and by transferring the images I find into paint, I aim to preserve a particular moment in time. Through this process, I am able to connect with the original photographer and bring their vision to life.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I think the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is that the journey is open-ended and continually evolving. I never know when I’ll stumble upon the next cache of photographs or when a sudden moment of inspiration will strike. Of course, I face the everyday challenges of making a living, but I often view my creative life as a perpetual treasure hunt—an ongoing search filled with discovery and surprise.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.dianajensen.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dianajensen_art_official/

Image Credits

portrait photo by : Stacy Greene