Diane Eugster | Strength in Simplicity

Diane Eugster pares her compositions down to their most fundamental and powerful state

By Elizabeth L. Delaney

You might say that Diane Eugster had no choice but to become an artist. She grew up surrounded by art and, perhaps more importantly, with an internal spark to create. Her mother painted. Her father owned an art-supply store. From the beginning, she shared a home and a life with something to which she felt innately connected. Maybe it was nature amplified by nurture; maybe it was destiny. Whatever the case, her head and heart knew what path to take almost immediately.

Eugster’s earliest memories of art-making revolve around her mother, a portrait painter. “As early as I can remember, she was painting things, and I was in awe of that,” she says. Watching her mom brush paint across a canvas to make a beautiful picture come to life, young Diane couldn’t wait to get her own canvas and brushes. Her mother was encouraging, supplying her daughter with plenty of pencils and paper to start, followed by the promise of teaching her how to paint when she got a little older.

Eugster’s interest in the human figure appeared early, and equally strongly. When she wasn’t drawing, she enjoyed looking at her mother’s Vogue magazines, which featured tightly cropped faces on each cover. The photographs fascinated 6-year-old Diane, who visually devoured every issue. “I just had to draw that face. I drew it every time,” she says.

Eugster took art classes in high school; by that time she had shown enough talent and potential that her father converted his woodshop into an art studio for her. She began to paint more seriously than ever. To complement her studio work, she gained real-world experience by working in the art-supply store her father had opened. “I really got an art education just working there,” she says. The job introduced her to professional artists and afforded her the opportunity to experiment with a wealth of media and materials.

Once she was grown up and on her own, Eugster continued to make art. She attended the Scottsdale Artists’ School in Scottsdale, AZ, in her 20s, then went on to marry and raise a family, all while painting in whatever free time she could find. Workshops at Scottsdale Artists’ School became a staple in her creative progression. Eventually she began to enter local juried exhibitions, and later she took a teaching position at the Las Vegas Art Museum. Before long, her work was hanging in two galleries on Scottsdale’s storied Main Street.

Eugster went through a period of painting landscapes, but once she became reacquainted with depicting the human form, she found her true calling as a painter. The revelation—a postlude to her fascination with portraits on magazine covers—came about when she enrolled in figure-drawing classes at a community college. “That’s really where the light turned on,” she says. “It was magic. That’s where I started to fall in love with doing the figure and doing people.”

Eugster was also greatly inspired by the stagelike atmosphere of the studio, in which the model and the surrounding elements were prescribed from the outset. She realized she could manipulate not only the formal elements of a painting—lines, shapes, and hues—but also the narrative elements such as lighting, props, and costumes. “It just pulled me in,” she says of those aspects of painting from life. “It was totally addicting.” Working with models in a studio allowed her to integrate her sensibility for visual design with her love of tactile design, and she has embraced that approach ever since, making it a pillar of her creative process.

Eugster tends to paint women, generally on the younger side, still swathed in youthful innocence that lends a certain freshness to the work. Her models sit for the camera initially, in an environment totally designed by Eugster and often wearing clothing the artist has made herself. “When I’m going to have a model shoot, I almost feel like a movie producer,” she says. She even writes out a “script” for the various scenes, lighting, and outfits she wants to set up during the session.

Whether photographing in her studio or drawing from life, she creates a narrative in her mind and constructs characters to fill it. She prefers not to know her models well, because that gives her a sense of freedom in creating a backstory for them. She does, however, attempt to intuit something personal and emotional about her subjects. “I try to harness something out of that person,” she says. “I’m not just trying to paint a nose or a mouth—I’m harnessing some kind of feeling.”

Her vignettes often juxtapose a realistic figure against an abstracted background to construct a complex visual narrative reflecting a unique time and place. She developed this signature stylization while looking for something beyond traditional, representational backgrounds. She wanted to bridge the naturalistic with the abstract, and so she called upon her penchant for design to make it work. She found that she could break up the picture plane and arrange the shapes, lines, and patterns to create a sense of energy and movement while not losing the emotional pull of the figure at the center of the composition. She likens this approach to fitting puzzle pieces together, and explains, “I try to marry the two: strong abstract design with some kind of meaning.”

After years of experimentation with complex color palettes and designs, today Eugster searches, instead, for simplicity. She limits her palette to her most trusted varieties of primary colors, mixing all other hues from those fundamental building blocks. She takes a similar tack with her compositions, reducing figures and backgrounds to elemental shapes, lines, and patterns. “There’s strength in simplicity,” says Eugster. “There’s strength in honing things down to their core.” This paring down of elements to their most fundamental and therefore most powerful state is another pillar of her practice.

Throughout her work, Eugster strives to communicate her feelings in addition to a visual narrative. To that end, she takes time to write out what she’s trying to express—to put her feelings and vision into words—before she ever takes brush to canvas. She considers what characteristics she wants a piece to have and how she will say it all using paint. What colors, lines, and shapes will she use? Will the paint be impasto or translucent? How will it embody the feelings that inspired her to create in the first place? She continues to analyze as she goes, summarizing each day’s work and considering where she achieved what she wanted, where she might improve, and what new directions she might take. This deliberate process gives Eugster the time and space to infuse every painting with a combination of tangible materials and intangible emotions that simultaneously please the eye and rouse the mind.

Five years ago, Eugster and her husband moved from their home in Las Vegas to Phoenix to be closer to the Scottsdale Artists’ School, where she had studied years earlier and later taught classes of her own. Now, with a move back to Las Vegas on the horizon, Eugster reflects on her time at the school as crucial to her artistic development. “I learned so much over these five years. It’s just unbelievable,” she says. “The biggest thing was realizing that there was no one ‘best’ way to do anything. There are many ‘best’ ways to do it. It just opened my mind up to the possibilities. I have grown so much with the experience of living here.”

But relocating has its own advantages in store for Eugster. She and her husband have designed her new studio from the ground up, and she’s looking forward to settling in with paint, brushes, and canvases, full of fresh ideas and inspiration. She also anticipates going back to teaching, which provides her an outlet to share her knowledge and continue to hone her skills as she prepares and delivers a curriculum.

“Things are really ramping up for me,” says Eugster. In 2020 alone she won a silver medal at Oil Painters of America’s National Juried Exhibition and a gold medal at the same group’s Western Regional Exhibition. Now in the prime of her career, she’s right where she needs to be—creating acclaimed art that engages on both technical and emotional levels. And although she feels she has hit her stride as a painter, she continues to search for ways to evolve her practice, driven by the challenge of each new painting and inspired by the thrill of placing her creative stamp on it. “I want to do something that is new and exciting yet is still ‘me,’” she says. “I want to paint what makes me feel good.”

representation
Meyer Vogl Gallery, Charleston, SC; www.dianeeugsterart.com.

This story appeared in the February/March 2022 issue of Southwest Art magazine.