dayenu fiber art
About my work
Inspiration surrounds me; from the leaves in my yard to the magnificent Oregon coast, everything my eye takes in become juice for the artist’s mind. But color dominates. Color and texture. My Jewish roots also call to me in the working and reworking of wool and silk- combining animal fibers into small abstractions. I could take the easy way out and say all the world’s artists have influenced me, but I would have to point to Joseph Cornell, The Fauves, Matisse and Helen Frankenthaler before I pointed to anyone else. And the spirit of Mark Rothko touches everything I do.
And then there is the word.: Dickens, Bellow, Roth, Edith Wharton and Tanakh find their ways into the works. While their written words seldom appear in my work, they are always metaphorically hidden in the fibers. And how fitting as a member of the “People of the Book”. Sometimes a piece begins with a word and slowly evolves into a field of colored wool speckled with silk and then a new word becomes the title. When whimsy enters the work I am even happier.
Why I Am Not a Painter- Frank O'Hara 1971
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
As a woman who began her art life as an art historian and morphed into a psychotherapist and then returned full circle to making art, I feel that each piece I make encompasses the circularity of my life, returning always to a previous place and never finding it the same. Coming home again doesn’t interest me as much as seeing what internal changes have occurred as people approach the spiritual home that resides within us.
About Diana Unterspan
Diana is a fiber artist living in Portland Oregon. She has a degree in studio art and art history from Colorado Women's College and two graduate degrees from the University of Colorado. She is a prize winning poet, publishing under a pen name in western and southern poetry anthologies. Until 2006, Diana was a full time psychotherapist in private practice. Diana has been working with fabric since she was six when a family friend gave her an embroidery kit. She began sewing in earnest as a teenager, making most of her own clothing. In 2001 she began making Judaica in the form of tallitot and ritual items for the home. She creates individual tallitot by commission, working in consultation with the wearer to create a meaningful individualized work of sacred art. To learn more about her tallitot and fabric ritual items visit the Judaica section.
Her commissioned work is in temples in Montgomery Alabama, Denver Colorado, Evergreen Colorado, New York City, and Portland Oregon. Diana's work has been featured in art shows at the Houston Fine Arts Center, Denver's Jewish Community Center, and the MAC Gallery in Montgomery, Alabama. Diana has been a juried artist in ORA Northwest Jewish Artists Celebration of Art For three years. Her work has been featured the Geezer Gallery in Multnomah Village in SW Portland, Neveh Shalom in Portland, and Art on Broadway in Beaverton , Oregon. Diana is also a member of the Millinery Guild. She has studied with Dayna Pinkham in Portland Oregon. Her hats can be found in independent shops and by contacting her directly at diana@dayenufiberart.net. She can also be found on Facebook. She does custom work or can size an existing hat to fit you thee way you want.
Although she loves making ritual Judaica her real love are her fiber "distractions": three dimensional felt vessels , wall hangings., and framed abstractions. To create these, Diana processes the raw wool by hand, dyes it t and then weaves, felts, embroiders, appliqués and embellishes her pieces into small framed or free standing assemblages. Recently she has branched out into whimsical organically inspired hats and jewelry, again using felt, silk and semi precious stones. Most recently she has begun experimenting with combining silk fiber and encaustic into dimensional landscapes.
When Diana is not working with wool and silk, she can be found volunteering at the Oregon Jewish Museum, giving tours an Lan Su Chinese Garden, learning Mah Jong at Congregation Beth Israel, reading to young students through the SMART program or tending her home gardens. One is distinctly and quietly Asian while the backyard is in the process of becoming an Audubon Certified wildlife backyard habitat. She and her husband are fans of modern ballet, opera and film noir. Her cat, Abigail, likes to bird watch and eat books- but not at the same time.
© diana unterspan 2001-2012 all rights reserved