Diane Marsh

b. 1954

Diane Marsh is a figurative painter whose works illustrate rich worlds, whether of her subjects’ inner psychology, vivid interior scenes, or nature. Concerned first and foremost with creating impactful paintings rather than documenting scenes or producing portraits, Marsh paints from collected photographs and engages with light and shadow, depicting the reflective glow of kitchen interiors or monumental arched windows which frame the outside world as both a decorative and shrine-like element within the interior scene. Marsh draws upon personal experiences and dreamlike states informed by her interest in mysticism and the principles of solitude, impermanence, and interconnectedness. Marsh lives and works in Estancia, NM, sixty-five miles from Santa Fe, and in her work combines psychic and physical frontiers, foregrounding the beauty of the American wilderness and built environments. 

Marsh began her career in Buffalo, NY while the city was a cradle of experimental media arts, film, and photography. She attended graduate school at the University of Buffalo with contemporaries of the "Pictures Generation," including Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, and Ellen Carey. In 1978, she had her first solo at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, one of the most dynamic contemporary art spaces in the U.S. during that period. She relocated to New York and set up a studio in Tribeca in 1979. The following year, Marsh had a year-long residency with the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (RAiR) in New Mexico, where the landscape shifted her understanding of light and yielded the artist’s desert palette of high-keyed colors—blues, purples, and pinks—that contrasted with the muted palette she associated with New York City. 

In 1981, Harmony Hammond included Marsh’s work in the traveling exhibition Home Work: The Domestic Environment Reflected In Work By Contemporary Women Artists alongside Ida Applebroog, Joyce Kozloff, Pat Lasch, and Miriam Shapiro, among others. Like her contemporaries, Marsh was acutely aware of gender and incorporated signifiers of domesticity associated with the Pattern & Decoration movement—wallpaper, colored tiles, curtains and patterns—into her figurative works as framing devices for her subjects.  

In the mid-1980s, Marsh exhibited at Frumkin/Struve Gallery, Allan Frumkin’s Chicago gallery, alongside artists such as Phillip Pearlstein, William T. Wiley, and Joan Brown. She earned a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1985, and began showing works with Ruth Siegal Gallery in New York. Wanting to leave New York after the sudden death of her partner, Marsh returned to New Mexico. Living in Santa Fe from 1988-1998, she was part of the vibrant cultural scene included artists like Terry and Joe Harvey Allen, who was also the subject of several of Marsh’s paintings. After living again in New York and later Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2002 Marsh was invited on her second year-long residence grant through the RAiR Foundation and with her family moved back to Roswell, NM. Marsh’s work is represented in the collections of the Hess Collection Museum, Napa, CA; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; the Albrecht-Kemper Museum, St. Joseph, MO; The New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe; the Roswell Museum, NM; Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY; and the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, NM, among many others.