Where Light Lives
Ormond Beach III, oil pastel, 2019 
Going Deeper II, oil pastel, 2015 
Fleeting Fall, oil pastel, 2014 
Daffodil Diagonals II, oil pastel, 2010 
Angled Ascent, 1997, acrylic
By Tom Wachunas
“Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.” ―
Nathaniel Hawthorne
"O, Sunshine! The most precious gold the be found on
earth." -Roman Payne
"It's the artist's business to create sunshine when
the sun falls." -Romain Rolland
“…But the transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur…” – G.K. Chesterton
EXHIBIT: Illuminated Visions: Art by Diane Belfiglio / at
the Atrium Gallery of the Birk Center for the Arts at Walsh University, 2020
East Maple Street, North Canton, Ohio / through
March 26, 2021, open to the public Mon-Fri 8 am - 5 pm
Belfiglio website: https://www.belfiglio.com/
Viewing art
during this exhausting, strange season of Covid has necessitated a kind of
hunkered down wintering in the World Wide Web. The Cloud. While I’m grateful
for the many platforms available for virtual viewing, even the most excellently
constructed of art websites are, ironically enough, generally unsatisfying
exercises in digital distancing (he said, as you scroll through this post.)
Interestingly, though, they’ve caused me to
cherish all the more those corporeal places, those purposeful physical destinations,
designed for seeing art. Galleries and museums, to be precise. Comparatively
speaking, encountering art in the Cloud, more often than not, falls short of
delivering potentially enthralling
adventures of mindful looking, in real time and real space, at actual art
objects.
So talk
about well-timed gallery exhibits. For any of you longing to commune with
tangible beauty, this 28-year retrospective by Diane Belfiglio, with works made
between 1992 – 2020, is a potent antidote for the often numbing sensations of
passively navigating the Internet.
Equally adept in
acrylic, colored pencil, oil pastel, or more recently watercolor, Belfiglio is
a marvelous technician. Here’s how she has articulated the alluring constancy
of her aesthetic:
“ 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 interplay 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.”
Extraordinary
indeed. I’ve always seen Belfiglio’s oeuvre as something akin to one hand firmly
caressing earthbound materiality, the other channeling through it the warmth
and movement of light. Like the dialogue between conductor and orchestra.
Even at their most
formally precise there is in her pictures a mesmerizing harmony of technical
acuity and compositional lyricism that imbues them with the rarefied air of
visual poetry. Her Ormond Beach oil pastel drawings from 2019, for
example, evoke a baptism, an immersion in purifying water, a rising to
ineluctable light. Always the light.
Thank you, Diane
Belfiglio, for filling this purposeful destination with the thoroughly enchanted reality of your sublime visions.
