Biography

Diane Mazur is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in San Antonio, Texas. Primarily a painter working with water and oil based paints, she has worked with many different mediums throughout her long career, including painting, drawing, mixed media, collage, ceramic sculpture, wood constructions, and installation. Renowned as a colorist, her work is widely celebrated for its vibrant palette, physical energy, and interactive qualities.

Mazur earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Modern Dance from Southern Methodist University in 1974, where she studied under James Surls. Surls later included her paintings in a groundbreaking 1980s exhibition at the Lawndale Annex—the historic artist-run space in Houston—during the influential "Fresh Paint" movement. This key moment helped launch her career on to the national stage. She went on to earn her Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from The University of Texas at San Antonio in 1978. She later completed post-graduate studies in ceramics under Steve Reynolds from 2000 to 2002.

Rooted in a strong background in dance, figure drawing, and extreme physical movement, Mazur approaches canvas work through gesture and action painting, using intense exercise to enter a flow state in the studio. Throughout her career, she has taught Dance, Creative Movement, Mat Pilates, Senior Fitness, and Gyrotonic, as well as College Art: Life Drawing, Ceramic Sculpture, 2-D Design, Art Appreciation (classroom and online) and Pilates.

In 1978, Mazur began exploring human perception and visual psychology through her signature "4-Way Works." Painted on the floor, these non-directional compositions are designed to be viewed and rotated from any angle. The series extends Cubist notions of transformation, simultaneity, and the reconciliation of opposites, alongside Surrealist modes of subconscious visualization, encouraging viewers to uncover shifting forms from each perspective.

Over a career spanning more than 50 years, Mazur has maintained a rigorous studio practice alongside roles as a college art professor and instructor in movement disciplines including Pilates and Gyrotonic. She was in the first, revolutionary Blue Star Exhibit in San Antonio, Texas, in 1986 and helped develop the vibrant, local art scene that San Antonio now enjoys.

Her accolades include a STARTsoma Residency in San Francisco (2003), a Creative Capital Grant (2010), a Freehold Residency in Taos (2018), the Lone Star Featured Artist Award (2019), and multiple Individual Artist Grants. She has been included in many major exhibitions and has had three Solo Retrospective Exhibits to date. She has been awarded several Individual Artist’s Grants and has continued to run and maintain a working studio for over 45 years. Please see her resume for more details at https://dianemazur.com.

Mazur married photographer John Dyer in 1978, and they have two children and seven grandchildren. She now works full time producing and exhibiting her artwork, participating in residencies, and running her studio.

Artist Statement

I am an American artist known for creating large, figurative, abstracted paintings and multi-media pieces. I am an Expressionist and am most influenced, art historically, by Cubism and Surrealism. I enjoy experimenting with Space, either exaggerating implied 3-D space on a 2-D picture plane, or creating ambiguous space, where the viewer's eye travels back in space before returning to the surface of the 2-D picture plane. I come from the figure, and I work through process.

Painting is like dreaming to me. It's a medium through which I can express deep emotions and thoughts that I can't express as well in other ways. I go through the ritual of stretching my canvas on the floor and looking at the stained shapes created. This calls for a response, and then one action calls for the next. A rhythm is created. I lose time. I feel color. I'm in the zone. I work through process. As the painting develops, I vacillate between this intuitive, automatic process, and a more analytical, formal method to solve the painting and make it work.

My work has always been a dialogue between figure, fantasy and abstraction. I strive for a tension between abstraction and recognizable subject matter, creating forms that are suggestive but not too literal. From painting around the canvas on the floor, I became obsessed with creating "4-Way Works" intended to be viewed from all four directions. The narrative quality of my early work evolved into a narrative/conceptual dialogue as I became more involved in seeing the works any of four ways, each view lending its own visual associative suggestions for personal interpretation by each spectator. I want the shapes to have the ability to transform from one viewpoint to another and I want the viewer to have fun experiencing this as a visual game or puzzle. This problem, and the criteria for my paintings that grew out of it, demanded that the images become more abstract. It also affected the composition of the painting and the transformation of positive and negative space as the viewer looks from different perspectives. They have certainly led to intriguing installation opportunities and collaborations with curators! I have presented them on the floor, the ceiling, with knobs that the spectator can turn. and some that automatically turn 90 degrees every 20 seconds. I always put hardware on the back that enables each piece to be hung from any direction.

Movement is also very important in my work and process, both physically and compositionally. Trained as a dancer, I work gesturally, moving around the canvas, throwing, splashing and staining the canvas with color. I begin by creating rhythms and harmonies with shapes and color. I like to let the paint do a lot on its own, and the viscosity of the paint is of upmost importance in determining how the paint will act and how the colors will mix. There is a distinct relationship to music in my work.

My paintings fit into what is described by cultural theorists, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker, into the "Metamodernism Movement", or "what comes after the postmodernist era for the 2020's and beyond". In this international movement, artists continue exploring ideas from past art genres and explore and develop them to include issues that are relevant in contemporary culture.

I create works that have layers of meaning and which can be interpreted in many ways. Some prefer to interpret the work symbolically while others respond more to the movement and color and the work's relationship to music, gesture and dance. Still others relate to the metaphysical content of transformation and simultaneity. I strive to keep a rawness in my work, in opposition to the mass of slick digital works being produced today. The more that the spectator brings to or sees in my work, the more complete that work becomes. I wish for my art to visually tickle the spectator's imagination and tap a source of interpretation for many people in many fields of knowledge.

It would be fun to create topsy-turvy world where things could be seen from any direction. I love the process of collaborating with curators to incorporate their ideas on how to present these pieces to encourage viewers to look at art in a new way. And now, it is fun and helpful to consult Ai’s Gemini or Claude. I have also asked Claude to try to create "4-Way-works, and so far, he has not been able to produce original designs that work in this way.

Things are not always as they appear to be. What is reality? What is abstraction? Everything is actually dependent on our perception and our interpretation of the world around us. I wish for my art to visually attract interest and be an inspiration and an uplifting experience for many people in many fields of knowledge and experience.

https://dianemazur.com
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Diane Mazur

Diane Mazur

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