Diane Detrick Bopp

Diane Detrick Bopp lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Yosemite National Park. Having taught many summer sessions in Yosemite Valley at the Art Activities center, it was only a matter of time before she'd meet and marry Wawona Hotel pianist Tom Bopp (guess who wrote this).

Diane holds Master of Arts degrees in Education (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo) and Art (Cal State Fresno), and teaches art in Oakhurst for the College Center and
Yosemite High School.  Originally from Southern California, Diane taught art
for 13 years at Beverly Hills High School, including special art programs at U.C.L.A. and U.C. Irvine.

Diane's watercolor painting "Itty Bitty Handhold" (Honorable Mention, Yosemite Renaissance Art Exhibition, 1985) is on loan as part of Mike Corbett's mountain climbing exhibit at The Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite.  Past exhibitions include:

Artist's Statement

 

     While it is natural to be attracted to extremes--highest emotion, deepest serenity, psychological tension, and the like--the subjects I find most attractive are found in everyday moments. These subtle moments often hold many of the primal elements of the human experience, for example, love, communication, and discovery.

     My personal acquaintance with the models, whether they are friends or family, inspire me to deeper expression of their beauty. I respond to their forms, faces, and attitudes--even clothing--on an elemental level that I try to communicate through my paintings. Each painting’s subject, environment, and overall design, are meant to integrate with the exhibit as a whole, and interact with the viewer on an individual level.

     With our tendency to focus on people and action, we often overlook their relationship to the environment. By interweaving realism with abstraction, I can express the feeling of integration between the subjects and environments. The realism helps one to recognize the subjects; the abstraction guides one into the deeper realm of the painting.

     I want the viewer to have a feeling of participation in each moment that I’ve depicted. Deep glowing colors and enticing textures speak to one in ways that words cannot. I believe that the sheer pleasure of dispensing pigment-ladened water smoothly onto good paper with a sable hair brush, creating richness, layering, and exploiting the transparency of watercolor, becomes somehow translated into the painting.

     When such elements are repeated, the viewer is guided into the three-dimensional as well as the emotional environment of the models. Often, as one follows the directions of the figures’ eyes, invisible attachments are formed, linking the models to each other, or to the viewer, or to the abstract elements. Each painting has a sort of rhythm, set into motion as the viewer is engaged and explores its visual and emotional aspects. Each aesthetic choice leads to the next, within each painting, and from piece to piece, and this rhythm unifies the exhibit.

     All is intended to guide the viewer beyond the superficial aspects--subject, technique, composition--to the feeling of the moment. It is my wish that the viewer leave this exhibit, not with memories of paintings, but of precious moments.