Diana Fairbanks captures the subtle beauty of our Pacific Northwest

Sometimes we take the subtle beauty of our Pacific Northwest for granted. The grays and muted greens and golds mesh into a misty drizzle of rain and wind, as we hide under umbrellas and rain gear.

Diana Fairbanks captures that beauty, especially her paintings of spectacular water and river locations across Washington State. Bodies of water like the Columbia, Skagit and Duamish River come alive on her canvas.

Crown Point, Columbia River Gorge

She relishes the excuse to look at the world intensely and record the wonders, delighting in the opportunity to mess with colors and textures to recreate the facts of the beautiful things she sees.

“My art is representational and I often integrate my interest in science into images. I also enjoy collecting and painting common objects in tabletop still lifes,” she explained

Backroads of Washington
She’s currently immersed in the “Washington Rivers” Project, something that came out of authoring Backroads of Washington. Her paintings of river scenes in Washington State show evidence that she’s experienced their scenic beauty.

Teaching Art
Diana truly values the process of art-making, which explains her continued interest in teaching art to others.

“It fuels my passion for drawing, as a valuable practice in itself and as a preparation for other arts such as painting and print-making. I am attracted to obscure drawing media because they require the artist to focus, with new skills, on the exploratory process of selecting, arranging, observing, recording, and evaluating a subject.”

Skookumchuck River

Background
Born in Seattle and now practicing art in her Olympia, Washington studio, Diana became interested in visual art and writing at an early age. She specialized in biological sciences and fine arts at Wenatchee Valley College and then received a full-tuition scholarship to study fine arts at Fort Wright College in Spokane.

Outstanding teachers during those years included: Robert Graves, Sr. Paula Mary Turnbull and Benjamin Franklin Moss. She completed a B.A. and B.F.A. in painting, drawing and a wide variety of related media, and also had her first solo shows of paintings and drawings.

During subsequent work with the Medical Communications Department at Virginia Mason Medical Center, Diana received a Kellogg Allied Health Education Fellowship to study medical illustration as part of her graduate program in educational technology, and completed an M.Ed. and an Ed.D.

Teaching Career
During and after her graduate studies, Diana taught drawing, design, illustration and a wide variety of media production courses at public and private colleges including Shoreline Community College, Bellevue Community College, University of Washington, Heritage University, and Western Washington University. Her former students follow fine art and visual communication and teaching careers throughout the Northwest. She is the proprietor of OlyImages Studio, and a recent recipient of an Artist Trust EDGE Program Scholarship.

Diana is currently a full-time artist who fulfills commissions and continues her teaching as Program Director at OlyImages Studio. She works in a variety of media including watercolor, acrylic, encaustic and oil media and uses a variety of printmaking methods. She’s also completely comfortable with art done on computer.