We were lucky to catch up with Diana Naccarato recently and have shared our conversation below.

Diana, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

A few years ago, I started an ongoing series of small, abstract drawings and paintings called ‘Pathways.’ These works are based on photographs, videos and sound recordings from quiet morning and early evening walks throughout New York City, where I live and work.

I look for movement in my surroundings for inspiration. Sometimes I find this movement in nature, like reeds swaying in the salt marshes of south Brooklyn, and other times I see it in everyday city scenes, like traffic buzzing by on an overpass. I document this movement with my phone, then bring the photos, videos and sounds back to my studio and refer to them while I make small drawings and paintings. My goal is to be as open and abstract as possible while capturing the rhythm and ‘aliveness’ of my subjects.

As the Pathways series evolves, the works are becoming more closely linked to the natural landscape and a distanced view of it. For example, many of the recent works from this series directly reference the shadows cast on the ground by plant life along the shorelines or sidewalks in the southernmost coastal areas of New York City. I look at these visual occurrences as deeply meaningful opportunities to connect with my surroundings, as well as a way to foster a sense of respect and appreciation for the city, while at the same time looking inward and reaching toward something larger than myself.

Recently, I traveled to Sardinia, Italy, to continue my research for this project. For two weeks, I was an Artist in Residence at Nocefresca’s short-stay residency program, where I sketched, took photographs, and recorded video and sound. I researched some of the many ‘nuraghe,’ or ancient structures that remain intact all over the island, and also photographed the surrounding coastline along the Mediterranean Sea. My experiences in Sardinia nourished both my work and my spirit. I am presently creating new works, mostly on paper, that directly reference the large body of materials I created and curated during the course of this residency.

I am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to see a new part of the world. It greatly influenced my art in new and unexpected ways. Having had this opportunity to travel for my project was incredibly meaningful, and has ignited many new ideas and generated a fresh approach to my work.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a New York-based visual artist working in abstraction. For as long as I can remember, I have had the impulse to create with my hands. As a child, I drew obsessively and also loved to crochet. My mother, a teacher, brought home special drawing paper she had purchased for her students. I was mesmerized by the way the textured paper would absorb the colors from my markers, and I made flip books to tell stories. My father, a musician, took me to an art school on weekends to work with clay and paint, and I felt at home in an environment of peers who also loved making things.

As a teenager, I started doing more and more art on my own, around the same time that I was discovering what kind of music I liked, and my brother, a music history buff and audiophile, helped me set up my first painting studio at home. I don’t think he realized at the time how meaningful it was to me, but he set me up with some incredible sounding gear and I spent countless hours listening to records he’d lent me, getting totally lost in my painting. I don’t always listen to music when I work. Sometimes I prefer silence. But there is something about sound and music that makes its way into my art—I am focused on rhythm and repetition, which are key elements in both painting and music. Anyway, in high school I started to focus on my portfolio and became more interested in abstraction and mid 20th-Century painters and the avant garde (though I don’t think I knew what it was called at the time). I liked anything that felt absurd or strange.  In college, I studied Painting and Drawing, with a minor in English, and worked primarily in oil painting. I started to find connections between free-form poems I was writing, and paintings I was making. I became fascinated with the history of abstract painting. Some of my favorite painters in college were Georg Baselitz and Philip Guston.

After my BFA, I moved back to the city and rented a studio. I stopped using color for a while, instead focusing on boiling down forms to their most essential elements, searching for an abstraction that was deeply personal. I exhibited in group shows in Queens and Brooklyn. After a few years, I used these black-and-white works to apply to graduate school, and ultimately graduated from The City College of New York (CCNY)’s MFA Studio Art program, which has an interdisciplinary approach. The small size of our cohort meant we were valued as individuals, which meant a great deal to me. Since I graduated from CCNY, I have been exhibiting my work and attending artist residencies, while teaching college courses.

It has been a great privilege to teach undergraduates while pursuing my art. The two-dimensional design courses I teach are focused on space and structure, and the ideas I work on with my students have shaped the way I approach my work. When working with students, I stress the importance of expressing the deeply personal through abstraction. How do you get an abstract painting to somehow reflect who you are and how you see the world? This is the same guiding question I have in mind when I am working in my studio. Abstraction, in all its openness, has the mysterious potential to bring us closer to our own innermost ideas and values, often because it allows us to boil concepts down to their most essential elements, getting rid of anything that is superfluous. It makes us consider what is most important, what we really care about, and then challenges us to only include those elements. That doesn’t mean the work has to be minimalist. An abstraction could be packed with information — vibrant colors, densely concentrated shapes and forms, implied and actual textures —- and still contain only what is absolutely essential. Still, one mark can put the whole work over the edge. It takes restraint, intention and confidence to get an abstraction to work well. The more I articulate this to my students, the more I think about it in my own work. I am grateful to have a profession that allows for this kind of thought and engagement with the fundamentals. I find all of this, from the studio process to the teaching and everything in between, to be very exciting and rewarding work, and am grateful to my mentors and my loved ones who have supported me along the way.

I take an experimental approach toward my art, trying lots of new things behind the scenes that don’t always become the finished artwork, but deeply influence the work. For example, when I record sounds during walks around the city, I often bring them back to my studio and make abstract, strange sound compositions from them. These sound works then inform the drawings and paintings. Sometimes they become works on their own, and I plan to someday exhibit them alongside the drawings and paintings.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I have had to reframe the way I think about presenting my work. There was a period where I was making new work but not sharing it with anyone, because I didn’t feel ready. As more time passes and I have more experience with the process of making and showing work, it gets easier. I care deeply about what I am doing and am always looking for my edge, to push the limits of what I can do or say with my art. I am after something surprising and unusual every time I step into my studio. As long as I am pushing for that, I feel confident putting my work out there and letting the viewer respond to it. When it comes to thinking about my audience, I have adopted a mentality of ‘let them decide,’ rather than deciding for them by not showing the work at all. Since I have started sharing my work more, I have had more shows, residencies, grants, and overall support of my career, so I am glad I have learned how to build more confidence in the process. It is really always about looking for that edge, that place where if I push an idea just a little bit further, it becomes something entirely new and exciting, something I couldn’t have imagined or planned for.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

An artist wants to make their art as much as possible, but there are so many other things that have to happen to make this happen. In practical terms, of course, we need daily resources and supplies in order to survive, so most of us work other jobs or sell our art. But there are so many other things an artist needs to do in order to be in their best mindset for making art, and those are generally the same things any person needs to do in order to feel well: exercise, sleep well, nourish the body with good nutrition, connect with nature and loved ones, and tend to finances. Some combination of these elements, or ideally all of them, will have to be taken care of if you are going to be your best creative self. Sure, artists can make interesting work during tough times in their life, but I think for a lifetime of sustained, consistent creative output to happen, overall you need these other areas of your life to be generally working in your favor. And it takes a lot to get all of those parts of your life in order and keep them going. I am so grateful that the people closest to me understand and support me in prioritizing my work and all of the things that keep the work going. It’s a certain way of ‘being’ in the world, and I think artists deserve to be respected for their pursuit of their work, and all of the peripheral activities that keep them going, even those activities that might not seem directly related to the art.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.diananaccarato.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/diananaccarato
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diananaccarato/

Image Credits
Image credit for Diana’s portrait: Anthony R. Mancini All artwork image credits – Diana Naccarato