My call to painting came at age 37, after two degrees and several careers. I have been painting professionally since 2002. Painting as an American painter, while paying homage to Hopper, Katz, Warhol, and Thiebaud, I try to find my own way. I am a professional oil painter, honest to what I believe and see as true. My paintings are direct and applied primarily with pallet knife. A part of this direct approach is making my painting a painting and not an illusion, recording or reporting of reality. I strive for believability not reality. The quality and use of the paint is as interesting to me as the image itself. While painting, I run up against the edges of the rectangle but I use the pressure of edges to hold my composition on to the rectangle but the paint wraps the edges. The edges press the viewer to stay within that rectangle. I begin creating with a subject. Often I am asked: "How do you pick your subject?" The answer is: "I don't pick my subject: my subject picks me." My subjects are often simple objects and scenes, emerging from my daily life of looking. It's the image that won't leave my mind until it is on a canvas. A "casual" subject always has a formal power of color, shape and form but it also has an emotional or metaphorical power. I attempt to communicate, reveal and to make others understand, what I see and feel. Through painting, I want my personal and visual experience will connect to the experience the viewer brings to the painting. It is in this that a painting becomes more than pigment on panel and the painting gains its power and life beyond its parts. In today's daily over-looked, over-stimulated life, where people always seem to be living and rushing into the next moment, one goal is to get people to stop, be still, to look and be moved before rushing on. As Franz Kline said: "If you do it with meaning, it will mean much." I stop work on a painting when it makes me smile. For me, there is no one goal to this process of making art. I want painting to take me where it will take me without any preconceptions and classifications. One painting leads on to another idea and an idea will lead on to another painting. And so it goes. Blog?  Did I hear you ask if I had a painting blog?  Happy you asked!  See mariandioguardi.blogspot.com ... Click here for Professional Affiliations • Notable Honors • Selected Exhibitions

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