Diane Fine

SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Art

I have been a printmaker for my entire adult life, and I love it. Printmaking is a process-oriented medium that involves drawing on or carving into one material, usually wood, stone or metal, and then transferring that image onto another material, usually paper. At SUNY Plattsburgh, we have an excellent print shop. We also have a small letterpress type shop and book bindery. I am happy to say that the print shop is very much a working and social community, with a wonderful spirit of cooperation. It is a place where students are taught to master basic technical skills and then encouraged to pursue their own aesthetic path, with my help and that of their fellow students. We often work collaboratively, producing shared works of art in the form of books or portfolios.

I work primarily in these two related art media: printmaking and the book arts. I am inspired by printmaking’s techniques that enable me to create many and varied kinds of surfaces and marks. The fact that you can make multiple copies of the same image in printmaking has always been important to me. I feel it enables me to share my work with more people. Collaboration with fellow artists, part of the tradition of printmaking and the book arts, has been an essential part of my learning process and production.

I have been a professor at SUNY Plattsburgh for many years now, which has given me the opportunity to watch the program develop and grow. I received my M.F.A. in Graphics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and my B.F.A. from Syracuse University. I have an active studio practice and exhibit my work regularly, which keeps me in touch with many of the experiences my students are having as they experiment and work towards creating pieces for exhibition. I am proud to be represented in many important collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New York Public Library, and Yale University Art Gallery. The last time I was on sabbatical, I was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Both were extremely important professional experiences.

The images in my prints and books are about the poetry of solitude and memory. They are about the comfort and poignancy of beauty. This relationship to beauty is derived from an essential human endeavor, one I believe I share with the viewer, which urges us to find and make things beautiful. These discoveries are necessarily positioned amidst the pain and suffering of lost and longing. Fundamental questions are asked, in spite of the fact that there may be no answers. Framing the question is part of our existence.