My name is Diana Toma and I paint emotional portraits. My favorite place in New York City is riding the Subway. I used to ride it everyday for years, just observing faces and sketching them. It is the love of observing my neighboring presence, whoever that may be, that creates a meaningful sense of my work. It lives in the communion with someone else's' essence. There is meaning where we overlap.
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. […] Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” - John Donne, "No Man Is An Island"
Art is all about joining a community. A community that gathers, connects, and transforms.
"Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity" said Lev Tolstoy in his essay “What Is Art?”
Artists must be present in all possible activities, not only in art galleries or museums. The artist must be the sponsor of thought in whatever endeavor people take on, at every level. The power of art is in the relating to the world and each other wholeheartedly, more curious, more willing to discover one in another.
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