Diane Fitch

‘Interior/Exterior’: Diane Fitch invites you into her home

Oct 20, 2018

Mugs, a ceramic pitcher, a round casserole dish and teakettle sit on a kitchen island, their round shapes meeting with rectangular cutting board, placemat, and other surfaces. Past them, through the kitchen window, stand slender trunks of leafless trees in thin winter light beneath a bit of pale blue sky. The warm indoor palette, curved shapes, and familiarity of the objects invite viewers to the intimacy of the kitchen, implying its welcoming warmth. The painting also opens curiosity about the people who live there — are those orange-handled scissors for a task to be done or one just completed? Diane Fitch takes viewers into her home and out of it in her Interior/Exterior paintings. Her solo exhibition, “Interior/ Exterior: Paintings and Drawings by Diane Fitch,” with over two dozen artworks, opened at the Vermont Supreme Court Gallery last week and continues to Dec. 21. “I love the title of this show because it says so much about Diane ’s unique painterly approach to her life and art — the interesting stories that seem to lurk around everyday scenes. We the viewers don’t know the full story, but she shows what we need to know in stylistically intriguing ways,” Vermont State Curator David Schutz said.

Many of Fitch ’s paintings in the exhibition bring viewers into rooms and spaces in her home, but also past those spaces — down a hallway, through a window to the outdoors, around a basement corner. The things of everyday life are there, including mugs, chairs, magazines on tables, dog beds, even the paint cans and boxes that come to rest in basements. In many, people engage in moments of daily life – a glance in a mirror, reading a book, playing music. Fitch, a full-time painter who lives in Calais, has exhibited nationally and internationally. A professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, where she taught for many years, she co-founded the university ’s summer studio abroad program in Italy. “I mostly work from direct observation. I have a studio in my house, but use my house as studio. There is not a division between my life as a painter and my life,” Fitch said, noting that besides using her home and surroundings as her subjects, the people in her paintings are not models, but family and friends. “I like the feeling of discovering possible paintings as I go through my life — the way a chair looks in certain light,” Fitch said. Painting from observation rather than using photographs in the studio offers a direct relationship to her subjects and their changes. “A photograph captures the way a machine sees a moment. That ’s not the way we see. We gaze, look around and take in changing light and details. The world doesn’t stay still. I’m picking and choosing in the act of painting,” Fitch said. “One chooses from fleeting moments, relationships, and sensations, knitting them together to fabricate a congruent, assembled, invented experience,” she noted in her artist ’s statement for the show.

In many of Fitch ’s paintings, the outdoors comes in. In “Abby, Hollister and Porter Play ‘Lily Dale,’” a trio of young people, with guitar and fiddle, make music in a living room, as sunlight illuminates the yard and trees outside. Contrasted by the brighter outdoor light, the room is almost in shadow, heightening the connection of the musicians. Everyday objects take on fresh dimension in Fitch ’s paintings. “Chairs” is not set in Fitch ’s home but in a salvage warehouse. The varied shapes and jumbled disarray of the seats open thoughts about the people who have used them. “Mattie and the Bucket of Joint Compound” takes viewers to Fitch ’s basement and hints at project done or ahead. “Little Fallen Man” with eclectic array of doll house, house models, manual typewriter and more, draws the viewer ’s eye to a little figure on the floor, a doll perhaps, of a man in a suit.

Fitch ’s use of texture and blocks of color is particularly striking. She works with a brush in smaller works, but with a palette knife in most of the larger ones, creating distinct blocks and planes. “I don’t want the mark to disappear. I’m not trying to fool the eye. The mark is a building block. I use deliberate planes of color and then I’m building planes,” Fitch said. “I like the emphatic-ness of the mark as a way of saying I’m seeing the world through the vocabulary of paint and the way I see is determined by the tool in my hand.”


“Interiors”: painter Diane Fitch invites us indoors

December 14, 2016

“I have been fortunate to live in complex cluttered spaces,” wrote painter Diane Fitch in the statement for her show, “Interiors,” now on display at the Castleton Downtown Gallery until Jan. 7. While persistent clutter defies our best attempts to organize and cull, Fitch sees something much different: lines and spaces, enclosures and openings in everyday rooms, the geometry of furnishings and objects. Her paintings hint not only that these settings have a life of their own, but that the humans that inhabit them participate in the same fabric of existence.

Strangers to us, Fitch’s friends and family may work and play in these rooms, but glowing colors, organic shapes and contrasting textures invite the viewer to share in the intimacy of a home, like slipping on a borrowed sweater.

In grad school Fitch worked a lot with still life, which is carefully arranged—but she found the periphery to be “more interesting,” she explained to the Mountain Times. She said she prefers to depict a scene as found, “to find the composition in a lived-in space.”

The result is not merely an environment for living in but a living environment, in which objects shift, appear, disappear, reappear somewhere else from canvas to canvas. A box of Kleenex has been set casually on a countertop; laptops and musical instruments are in use; tomato soup in a pan on the stove finds its way into a bowl on the table. Each setting is dynamic, subject to random fluctuations as humans use the space, and this is what Fitch aims to capture.

Standing in a gallery room lined with her work, Fitch said that while she concentrated on French Impressionism in grad school—some of the paintings here suggest Cezanne’s or Van Gogh’s techniques and use of color, as an instructor she encountered the Italian Renaissance, which was a major turning point in her evolution as a “perceptual painter,” as she calls herself. She took a sabbatical in Italy while teaching at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. “One can learn everything there is to know about making paintings by studying a Titian, a Chardin, a Vermeer,” she wrote.

Renaissance art used the human figure to provide scale for architecture and the natural world. Fitch became fascinated and began to populate her compositions with her own family and friends, beginning with a self-portrait record of her first pregnancy. She explained that she has never hired models, nor does she create portraiture as such. In her paintings, people read, play an instrument, make a cup of tea, work on their laptop, or simply provide a human presence within the clutter of everyday life. Games (including electronics), books, and music are frequent themes. “The subject of figure in the interior continues to resonate for me, as my most potent metaphor,” she wrote in the statement, “with the interior space implying inner life.”

Thus the show’s title, “Interiors.”

The paintings and drawings in this show span a decade, 2006 to 2016, and are set in domiciles from an old Ohio farmhouse to a summer house by a lake to her own “little house with walls painted in the colors of Italian frescoes” in Vermont, she told the Mountain Times. She often lays down color like frosting, entirely with a palette knife, which, though expertly done, can mean that some of the pictures are best viewed from slightly to one side or several steps back.

The spaces depicted in her paintings—a kitchen, an old-fashioned parlor, a sunporch, even a cellar crammed with odds and ends—are both particular and universal. Each environment has a distinct mood, expressed by Fitch’s choice of color palette, season and lighting.

Anyone who has spent time in a country house surrounded by fields and trees can relate to “Morning Tea,” showing a bathrobe-clad woman putting on the teakettle in a chilly kitchen lit by the glare of morning light reflecting off the snowy scene outside the windows. “Donna’s Porch”—a sunporch at noontime expressed in lush reds, yellows and greens, populated with rattan chairs and a dog curled up in a sunny spot and a stand of sun-drenched pines at the edge of the glowing lawn outside—positively radiates late-summer heat.

The focus is always on the rooms and their contents, but nature beckons beyond the windows, in what Fitch calls “paintings within paintings”—echoing the Renaissance device of offering a glimpse of a miniature landscape beyond the window frame. The fun really begins when a bright outdoor scene is reflected back from another window or a framed picture or a mirror on a wall. The contrast between indoors and outdoors can be restful, comforting, gay, or arresting, as in “Dusk,” where the intense cobalt tone of the winter darkness outside presses against the windows of the starkly lit, spartan country kitchen.

What makes these compositions depart sharply from the Renaissance is Fitch’s adaptation of the inflexible grid of linear perspective with its flat-screen foreground and distant vanishing point. “I include in one painting a span of space that cannot be taken in by one static viewpoint,” Fitch explained. The result is the sense that everything is either moving away from or toward us (a perspective pioneered by Degas, Van Gogh, and other French Impressionists). Nevertheless, the viewpoint is a definite height off the floor— “I’m 5 feet 4 inches,” Fitch laughed.

Fitch works from life: she notes “the meagerness of the photograph as a sole source of painting imagery … The human gaze is quite different than how a camera sees,” she writes. “When we binocular-visioned humans deeply look, we scan a space, looking up, down and around.”

In “Hollister’s Sewing Machine Collection,” the familiar kitchen now contains three vintage sewing machines on different tables, facing in random directions like rowboats on a pond. Each one—along with each table and chair—occupies its place independently: if the lines of conventional perspective for each were extended to the horizon, they would cross like pickup sticks. The floor appears to sag toward the front and the walls appear to bend to the right and left; on the right sunporch windows open onto a long vista of farmland, bare trees, barns, ending at a distant ridgeline. In the far right corner of the porch a person appears to be consulting a smartphone.

“A simple narrative element sets the painting in motion,” she wrote in the statement. It could be a couch, a view out the window, a bright reflection, a pool of light. “As I make the painting I create paths,” she continued. Fitch makes frequent use of hinged compositions, where the vertical line of a corner, a post, a half-open door, allows the scene to unfurl to both right and left, into other rooms. She also likes to depict a space from opposite corners, often including the same object—a mug of tea, a bucket of joint compound—to provide continuity.

Two canvases from this year, unfinished studies of the “bunkhouse basement” from two different angles, reveal her method. Wedged into a corner behind a couple of manual typewriters, she delineates the placements and multiple perspectives in bold brown lines, switching to black to keep track of her changes, she said. Then she adds patches of color. Two human figures: a woman and a child, occupy the space along with laundry machines, chairs and shelving crammed with stored items. The only finished details are their faces in “Bunkhouse Basement No. 2.”

“This process of reassessing, redrawing, goes on for me throughout the process of making a painting, but the evidence of that search is usually buried under the resolution. I am excited that in my most recent paintings, the bunkhouse basement series, the evidence of the search remains visible and thus the act of reassessing and redrawing is integrated into the image,” she told the Mountain Times.

Less easy to grasp are the tableaus borrowed from Scripture, in which her children and friends reenact scenes for her series “Saints and Sinners.” Her motive is “to explore the changing meaning of these archetypal narratives when the action is transported to a present-day interior setting.” Viewing the complete series on her website helps to create the impression of the eternal nature of these themes that underlie everyday life.

A painting might take six months to complete, she explained, but despite that her output is enormous. It can be viewed on her website, dianefitch.com. A native of Vermont, Fitch completed a B.F.A. at the now Maine College of Art in Portland and an M.F.A. at Indiana University in Bloomington. Capping 30-year career teaching fine arts, most recently at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, she returned home to Calais in 2012, where she continues to paint.

Artist recasts Catholic saints in modern-day setting

May 2, 2012

FAIRBORN — Among Catholicism’s diverse patron saints, there are patron saints for sleepwalkers, anesthesiologists and even unhappily married couples. That’s just three examples of the thousands who have been canonized. Wright State University professor Diane Fitch has recast some of these saints in a modern-day setting.

Her works are part of a faculty art exhibition on view at WSU.

Fitch, a painting and drawing professor of art and art history, is showing dozens of paintings and drawings. Gallery coordinator Tess Cortes said the vast number of works is due partly to a six-month sabbatical that Fitch took a year ago to visit France.

“Borrowing gestures and configurations from medieval and renaissance paintings and from Gothic relief sculpture, I recast iconic Christian episodes and scenes from the lives of saints in a contemporary space, using my children as models,” Fitch said. “My intent

is to explore the changing meaning of these archetypal narratives when the action is transported to a present-day setting.”

Fitch deftly blends the imagined narrative with sumptuous oils. Her use of color, detail and light vs. shadow shift the viewer’s focus, while characters’ emotions add intrigue to the works. In “St. Dymphna, Patron Saint of Sleepwalkers, Epileptics, and the Mentally Ill,” a boy cowers in the corner of a laundry room ashamed to be seen in his skivvies. Other works deal with themes of betrayal, conflict and loyalty.

St. Monica, the patron saint of patience, must send spiritual guidance to Rante. Printmakers are a patient lot, but Rante takes diligence to the extreme by painstakingly cutting repetitive patterns in paper. She’s showing delicate printed patterns and large- scale installations for this exhibition. In “Capture,” a graphite and gouache on cut paper, a different type of pointillism results from the tiny, pinpricked designs.

WSU professor’s self-portraits provide a record of her life, including her battle with breast cancer

April 28, 2012

FAIRBORN — Diane Fitch’s 1998 mastectomy is far enough past to have lost its immediacy on most days.

But whenever someone she knows is diagnosed with breast cancer, “I relive it for a moment and have a flashback of fright,” said the artist and art professor at Wright State University. “I feel empathy and an acute sense that I’m here. I’m glad to be alive.”

While she and her emotions have evolved since that time of crisis, she retains an unchanging record of it.

A series of drawings and paintings she made at the time show her as she looked upon diagnosis, while waiting for surgery in the hospital, after the mastectomy and after reconstructive surgery.

Self-portraits have been a constant in her creative and professional life.

“I had always done them up until then. I was my own most reliable model — always available,” she said. In the more than 20 years since she has been a parent, she has also pressed her three children into regular service as subjects.

During her first pregnancy, she did one self-portrait each month, charting the progress “as this alien took over my body.”

Twelve years ago, after the lump was found and before she went into the hospital, “I felt compelled to do a self-portrait as a way of saying goodbye to my body as I had known it up to then,” she said.

The later nude portrait after reconstruction incorporates a smaller drawing of her as she looked in the ninth month of her pregnancy. One of the inanimate objects, resting on a table, is “a pregnant onion,” said Fitch, 56, who lives in Yellow Springs.

Her face shows no obvious emotion in the drawings, which allows them to speak for themselves.

It wasn’t her intent to seek a therapeutic outcome in making them.

“I’m here today because I had health insurance and quality care,” she said.

In retrospect, however, Fitch said they did express the fact that “I didn’t know if I would live. It was a way of keeping me in the moment, expressing who I am and what I do. These are the things that keep me aware of my experience of this world.”

The works on paper were part of an exhibition in 2000 at Sinclair Community College. Jane Black, now the executive director of the Dayton Visual Arts Center, wrote a review of the show. She recalls how Fitch’s drawings had “an immediacy and presence that capture feeling. The series made me feel empathetic and terrified at the same time.”

Fitch said a short story by Jane Smiley, “The Age of Grief,” also informed her drawing at the time.

It says, in part, “The cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from.”

In 12 more years, perhaps Fitch and those who view her latest series of paintings will mark another period in her life.

In 2008, while on sabbatical, she studied the interiors of cathedrals in France.

Those locations are now appearing as the backgrounds and settings for oil paintings in which her children, who range in age from high school senior to graduate student, also appear. They are striking poses from various Renaissance paintings as they enact moments from various stories that also inspired her.