August 2024 Artist of The Season

This summer's Artist of the Season, Diane Vaquerano, embodies sun-drenched color and tropical abundance, drawing on her El Salvadoran roots and graphic design background to depict vibrant scenes adorned with fruits, florals, and textiles from her abuela's closet. Her practice is tactile and playful, exploring pastels and paint to revisit personal memories and celebrate the beauty of her culture and everyday life. Diane splits her time between California and New York.

NAME: Diane Vaquerano

PLACE OF BIRTH:  Long Beach, California

CURRENTLY RESIDE: Brooklyn, NY

YOUR COFFEE ORDER: Usually a cortado or macchiato, or cortado over ice if it's hot weather

MOST-USED EMOJI: Smirk face

FAVORITE FLOWER: A tough one! Recently into carnations. I like that they look like little puff balls of color. But this might change.

We’re big fans of your work. Were you always an artist? What has your artistic journey been like?

In some ways, yes. At a young age, I was introduced to musical instruments, specifically the accordion! How that instrument entered my life is comical! But that's what helped stretch my young mind into feeling and expressing creatively. Apart from that, I was always drawing and after my dad taught me to sew, would sew little pieces of clothing here and there, too.

I returned to drawing when I was living in New York and working as a brand designer. Drawing offered a means to express my emotive states. That flourished into me exploring subject matter from my life — fashion, flowers and plant life, romance, men, women, and my family's cultural heritage.

How has your art evolved or changed over the years?

It started with gestural line work to capture a figure, their pose, and the silhouettes of what they are wearing. From there I explored deeper with soft pastels. I loved that! Pastels allowed me to be bolder with color and textures. As I became more comfortable with pastels I started doing fuller compositions of a figure and a place. Pastels inspired me to move into canvases with acrylic paint. 

Your art is influenced by your roots in El Salvador and your experiences living in New York and California. How has your work changed your relationship with these places?

Living in New York I began to miss my cultural roots in El Salvador that stemmed from my family in California. My family had settled between Long Beach and Los Angeles, and when I was younger there were many visits to El Salvador that left a lasting impression on me. The tropical landscape, fruits, and food felt like another world compared to the desert and stretched beaches of Los Angeles. In New York, I experienced a bustling, urban city, with layers of diversity, and all four seasons! All three places play into my work — it's a multi-lens influence.

Tell us a bit about the mediums you work with.

I work with soft pastels, oil pastels, and acrylic paint across paper and canvas. I have a fondness for pastels because their pigment is so vibrant and I simply submit to and work with the color set I have. It's also messy! I like that very much. It feels like a form of play for me. I honestly feel like a child! 

With painting, I have to mix my colors and think through them a bit more. The application of paint is very soothing for me. I feel very happy when I'm holding a brush and applying paint to a canvas.

You’re also a graphic designer. How does working digitally inform your art, and vice versa?

Exploring art physically gives me a break from digital work and computer screens. It is a means to quiet down my design brain, the logical parts, and really step into feelings and my own expression. As a designer, I'm an interpreter for someone else. With art, I am my own source. It forces me to dig deeper into my own notions of beauty, thought, and experiences.

Your work often portrays people and narrative scenes. How do these develop for you and are there any characters or stories you keep returning to?

As an art director and designer, I’m compiling all sorts of things — travel, feelings, styles — and packaging them to convey a lifestyle or a story. I’m doing the same in my art but with my own experiences — the people I know, people I’ve dated, my friends and family, and all the stories we share.

I keep returning to moments I’ve had in El Salvador and the people I’ve met there. I think because it’s so different from my upbringing, I have an attachment to those moments. I yearn and desire to be around it more. But more simply I would say it’s what my mind finds to be beautiful — handmade tortillas in a colorful woven basket, volcanoes, fincas de cafe or coffee farms, textiles my grandmother would sew into long skirts, cacao, papayas, and more!

Do you listen to anything while you work? What have you been listening to lately?

Yes, all kinds. Lately, I've been listening to more Caribbean-style music or Afropop, like the artist June Freedom. Or I'll put a bit of classical music to mellow out and quiet my mind a bit. I especially like Olafur Arnalds who mixes neo-classical with a bunch of things. His sound is so beautiful and soothing!

What has inspired you lately?

Mayan pottery, vases, and tile design.

Is there a particular feeling or message you hope your work conveys?

That people of color are beautiful, as they are! That really, behind all the stereotypes and made-up assumptions perpetuated over years, decades, and centuries, our cultural differences are to be celebrated. It’s what makes us unique and shows different paths and ways of living on this earth. And despite all that, there are still stories, histories, and struggles that are relatable because it’s all human experiences and we can connect through that. My interest is to share that.

Dream collaboration?

Aimé Leon Dore, Casa Blanca, Rosalia, Bad Bunny

Your perfect day:

A large healthy amount of sleep, coffee and breakfast, a moment to read, and beautiful daylight entering the studio. It's perfect when there are no plans so I can be in the studio all day.

I also love a beach day: a good lounge in the sun, sand, umbrella, and a little Bluetooth speaker for the Bad Bunny tunes :)

Thank you, Diane! We’re so excited to have you as our Artist of the Season.

Diane will have original, small-scale works on paper for sale throughout the show.