User:Cjpaddock/sandbox

Diane Andrews Hall (born 1945, Dallas, Texas) is an artist who lives in San Francisco, California. Over a forty-year career she has exhibited extensively and her work is represented in numerous collections throughout the United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe. Although there are realistic elements to her paintings, her primary interests are in light, transience, motion, and time.

Diane Andrews received her BFA from Sophie Newcomb College, New Orleans (1967). She studied for one semester at Boston University with Walter Murch and, upon his untimely death, transferred to The Hoffberger School of Painting, The Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore where she received her MFA while studying with Grace Hartigan (1969). In the summer of 1967, she attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine where she met fellow student Doug Hall. They were married in December of that year. Diane Andrews (now Diane Andrews Hall) moved to Baltimore where she and Doug lived until completing graduate school in 1969.

On moving to San Francisco in the summer of 1969, Andrews Hall along with Doug Hall and Jody Procter founded the T. R. Uthco Collective. Through the 1970s she directed most of the collective’s performances, both staged and on the street, and took many of the photographs that have since become iconic for T. R. Uthco and their frequent collaborators, Ant Farm. While she abandoned painting to pursue more “radical ways of operating,” and to take care of her young son, born in 1970, painting was never far from her mind and she returned to it with a passion in 1978 around the time the collective disbanded. The subject matter of Andrews Hall’s paintings and drawings is weather, oceans, and birds in flight but as the poet and art writer Bill Berkson wrote of her work in an Art Forum review in 1995, “The weather comes parsed in sets of prismatic incident each bearing its load of absence and fullness, rapture and resolve. This is sumptuous conceptual painting.” Andrews Hall is a painter of time, light, and movement. She does this by marking the swirl of air as it takes shapes in the form of clouds, the flicker of birds as they alight in her back yard, the pattern of light as it reflects off the surging ocean. Or as the writer and UC, Berkeley professor, Lyn Hejinian, wrote about Andrews Hall’s painting, Hummingbird and Grevillea in a catalog accompanying her  2019 exhibition at Rena Bransten Gallery, “It would be a mistake to refer to Hall’s works as paintings or drawings of the ocean or its waves, or of the sky or clouds, or of birds. She doesn’t depict or represent. Or, rather, activities like depicting and representing are secondary to those she intends, which is seeing. Hall has an astoundingly active and acute visual sensibility. She is alert to the visible particulars of the world around her, and she remembers those particulars and notes alterations to visual details in the garden, in the landscape, in the sky. For Hall, that the world appears—that we live in a realm of ever-changing but ever-present visibility—is an aesthetic truth and an observation regarding the flicker of the ongoing natural histories that she depicts.”