Diane Levesque

Our world is filled with marvelous, captivating, annoying and repulsive things. In contemporary culture, objects are invested with projected and speculative value. Seeming to possess both magical and provocative powers, objects stir up an insatiable and repetitive desire to possess. This is not a new story, but it offers endless variations that I seek to explore in my work.
As far as stories go, I have always felt a connection to inanimate objects. As a child I watched my father, who practiced the strange art of taxidermy, transform dead animals into the facsimile of the living creatures they had once been. All around me things held momentous potential and terrible consequences. Following the example of my father, I became a storyteller of imaginary worlds.
Consequently, the narrative structure in my paintings has evolved through many stages. The objects I depict function as screens for psychological projection. The selection of each object follows the art of memory in which random things trigger associations to arise in the viewer's mind.
The newest stage of my work has taken a surprising turn due to the impact of reading Lucretius's "On the Nature of Things". When Lucretius began his study of natural phenomena, he i...