Diane Stevens has been actively making art for nearly her entire life. She has an MFA degree in painting from San Francisco State University, and a BA in art from Notre Dame de Namur University, which she attended as a Regent's Scholar. Early formal studies at UCLA included work with renowned American masters Richard Diebenkorn and Joyce Treiman.

A landscape painter by training, Stevens focuses her attention not only upon the literal, visible landscape, but recently within an abstract format that allows her to deal with less obvious landscape issues. In the Horizon Line series, she attempts to reduce the landscape to its most primary common denominator, the horizon. Within this context, she works in a painterly, colorist manner to seduce the view into "seeing" landscape within a square format of paint, one that has few literal indicators of what we think of as "land."

In her most recent series, Italian Walls, Diane deals with cultural and physical interactions between the world of man and nature. The walls, symbolic of western culture, are worked in both additive and subtractive manner to mimic the interaction of time and human and natural events upon a cultural landscape. Canvasses are scraped, abraded, drawn upon, and repainted — much as surfaces are in the real world. The results are complex statements about the coexistence of man and nature.

Ms. Stevens also continues to paint the natural landscape. For her, it remains a source of enduring interest. For her, nature's complicated patterns, its myriad forms and functions, are a constant reminder of the interconnections of all life.