Fossilization of the High Priestess

Diana Hansen

The art of Diana Hansen is a unique combination of the traditional and personal. Her paintings and prints use traditional techniques and images as a framework for Hansen's own experience of the world; a view of reality that goes beyond the individual to the universal. "As an artist, I am influenced by everything," she said, "but my work actually comes from another reality. It is another way of seeing."

Her richly textured intaglios are reminiscent of metaphysical Indian sand paintings, and many of her titles refer to Indian rituals and religious ceremonies. But, like American Indian artists, Hansen is not interested in academic imitations. She simply allows her images to appear spontaneously from her unconscious. In this way, the traditional colors and symbols of the Navajo, Pima, Hopi and other Indian tribes become transformed into a contemporary vision that uses the past to illuminate the present.

As a printmaker, Hansen has experimented with a wide range of techniques and processes. Most recently, she developed her own technique of hand-painted collagraphic prints. Each print is a unique image with a rare, sculptural elegance. Her etchings are even more subtle and intimate, with sand-like textures and touches of blue, yellow and red. Each print is a delicate and complex composition of geometric shapes with multiples of circles and semi-circles, interlocking squares and rectangles, triangles that become arrows and themes which dissolve into smaller and smaller variations.

While Hansen's prints are strongly influenced by American Indian motifs, similarities to European artists such as Klee, Miro, and Kandinsky can be seen as well. This influence is even more pronounced in her newer works, which are more completely within the European tradition.