Awareness: Martha Diamond

Today I wanted to look at the work of Martha Diamond. She was a contemporary painter born in 1944, and active from 1976 until very close to her death in late 2023. She was known to be an neo-expressionist painter, but did not label herself as such. Her work uses lots of contrasting colors and sharp lines and angles, with visible brush strokes in lots of her pieces. Many of her works depict urban cityscapes, while others are mainly abstract.

Cityscape with Blue Shadow, 1994

I really like the contrast between the colors without them being extremely bright. She uses one color to highlight the others, in this painting it is the blue. I also like how the brush strokes are visible in most of the painting, and give it a texture that adds to the subject of the work. I also think that the strokes used to paint the sky create a draw out a more whimsical and distorted emotion than the building does. One thing I think is a little confusing is that without the title being including cityscape I don't think it the subject would necessarily be identifiable as a building. I understand that part of expressionism is that the subject matter is not accurate to the real world in order to convey emotion, which I can gather from this piece. I just think that the subject could be a little more accurate to real life while still carrying the same amount of emotion through the colors or distortion of the reference.

Untitled, 1973

This is one of Diamond's earlier works, and I can really appreciate the difference in style and the more abstract approach. I really enjoy the use of more earth tone colors and the movement of the brush strokes. It feels almost like a landscape of a forest and waterfront, which creates a calm and serene atmosphere in a painting using somewhat wild brush strokes. Again I can notice the use of contrast between colors without using particularly bright colors, and the texture given to the piece through the individual strokes.

Progress: Artist Copy

This week was particularly challenging because I had to restart my entire project. My original got lost so I had to re-resize and start working on the mark all over again, however, it was not too bad because I started on a different portion and worked on some completely different marks. Rembrandt uses a LOT of hatching and cross hatching, but also utilizes a lot of negative space as well.

Right now what I'm struggling with the most is the number of hatch marks, and the angle I have to draw them at. Scaling up a pen and ink drawing means that I have to compensate for the density of the lines by drawing more, since I cant just make the lines bigger. The other issue is that he uses a lot of long fluid lines, but drawing them on such a large scale makes it difficult to keep it as one smooth line. To fix these problems what I've been doing is making one line out of multiple, and trying my hardest to make them look like one line rather than multiple.

Overall I'm really happy with this project so far, and I think that I'm getting a good understanding of Rembrandt's mark in order to have my own portrait look similar.