Past Exhibition
Summer Sunshine
Peg's Gallery
June 8, 2022 — August 9, 2022
Diane Belfiglio (September 11, 1956 – March 25, 2023)
Diane Belfiglio was an award-winning and celebrated artist whose works were featured at numerous galleries and museums around the world. Most recently, Diane received the 2023 Award of Excellence from the Ohio Arts Council. She was an Assistant Professor of Art and Studio Coordinator at Walsh University, where she taught for 23 years. Previously, she had taught at Syracuse University, Kent State University, and the University of Akron.
She earned a BFA from The Ohio State University in 1978, and an MFA from Syracuse University in 1980. Diane has exhibited in more than 225 group and solo shows regionally, nationally, and internationally. Her works are in the permanent collections of six museums, including the Butler Institute of Art in Youngstown, the Itchiku Kubota Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Canton Museum of Art. In addition, her works are in 18 corporate, hospital, library and university art collections and numerous private collections — including singer Patti LaBelle’s.
Artist Statement
I love summer. The earth is warm, flowers bloom, the days are long, and sunshine prevails. Summer is the season that inspires my art. In selecting the pieces for this retrospective exhibit representing 30 years of work, I realized just how much of summer’s intense light and color is captured in my past work, and continues to shine in my newest work, like musical threads echoing throughout a larger symphony.
No matter the subject or medium, my work is firmly grounded in the formalist ideas that have interested me since my beginnings as a professional artist: closely cropped images bathed in the play of pattern between sunlight and shadows. Although realistic in presentation, I rely heavily on the underlying abstract qualities of my forms. Shadows, ethereal by nature, take on a rigid structural aspect in my compositions. Colors range from brilliant to subtle in an effort to reproduce the strong sense of sunlight streaming through each piece. My goal is to transform the mundane into the extraordinary, so that we see beauty in images that generally go unnoticed by most of us on a daily basis.
