I make art for the spaces and people it will inhabit — work that carries the depth of something ancient and reveals the beauty that nature and culture, at their most generous, still hold out to us.

My practice is rooted in a conviction: that what we build around us contains more than it immediately reveals, and that the work of art is to make that depth visible. Everything begins in the field, photographing, observing, collecting what the world offers, and is built in the studio through the patient layering of image, material, and mark. Over three decades, that instinct has deepened and expanded into three distinct bodies of work, each growing naturally from the one before.

Fresco Photography

This is where it began. I coined the term in 2004 for a technique developed through twenty years of living in Rome: layering original photography of monuments, statues, and architectural details with the textural patinas of the places they inhabit, the worn stone, the quality of light on an ancient wall, the marks left by centuries of human presence. Built through multiple translucent layers, the result is atmospheric and often muted, with a depth that feels historic and contemplative. Something revealed rather than made.

Fresco Collages

Using photography exclusively, these works merge many images into a single composition, photographic details of my paintings, figures, monuments, architectural fragments, and more dreamlike forms, assembled into collages where the human figure moves through layered space. Poetic, suspended, alive with feeling. Compared at gallery showings to the work of Chagall. They carry the same muted depth and historic atmosphere of the fresco images, but with greater visual complexity and an openness to the interior journey.

Mixed-Media Collages

My most recent and most physically immediate work. Built from paint, handmade papers and textures, botanical forms, found natural elements, and at their most personal, fragments of text, fabrics, and keepsakes, these large-scale pieces are more three-dimensional, often richer in color, and more openly hand-made than anything that came before. Every decision is visible in the layered whole, brave, unguarded, and built to be entered like crossing a threshold into the artist's and viewer's interior universe.

All three bodies of work share the same origin: a practice of deep looking, built in Rome and carried forward into the landscapes and light of California. Since returning in 2016 I have expanded the work to include the living world of the Bay Area and beyond, gathering new material in the field and bringing it back to the studio. I also lead Artist Salon Private Retreats in my studio overlooking the San Francisco Bay and in Rome and the Italian countryside.

Over the years I have been commissioned to create large-scale art installations for hospitality, healthcare, universities, corporate environments, and residential properties. My work has been featured in gallery exhibitions around the world and hangs in many distinguished private collections. It is currently on view at Gerald Bland Inc., New York, and available to view in person or virtually at my studio in Point Richmond, California.

When I am making, I am excavating, moving freely between photography, paint, and collage the way a child moves through a wonderland, following what calls rather than what is planned. Hidden things surface: love notes, symbols, songs, colors, and forms that become messages I didn't know I was carrying.

What I am always after is depth: beyond the surface, in the interior space, in the person standing before it.”

- Diane Epstein

Available as limited edition prints, site-specific commissions, and deeply personal bespoke works. For pricing, availability,or simply to begin a conversation, Make the Connection ↓