Diane Cionni: June 11

Previous to 2010 when this was painted, I had been doing a lot of observation-based landscape paintings outdoors in Steamboat Springs where we lived. I had a digital camera and took to taking photographs by holding my camera randomly deep into the foliage of weeds and plants and trees aiming from the ground up. I was fascinated by these brambly skyscape compositions. I saw them as the plant’s own viewpoint of the world as its leaves reached for the sun. This ant on a branch kind of perspective felt more genuinely like my own experience of nature than the more formal compositions I was painting at the time so, based on these images, I began a series of oil and acrylic paintings that I continued for years.  Over time, the paintings became progressively more abstract leading me into new approaches to my work.   In the painting in this show, the flower forms are actually tiny dandelion buds in the grass in the backyard of my studio.