DIANA MONKHORST works as a full-time artist with photography as her medium. She graduated from the Rietveld Academy with a specialty in portraiture. From an initial love of portraits, her interests have turned more and more toward still life, but the approach remains the same. Diana works to get as close as possible to the essence of the chosen subject. In her photography she deliberately uses dark backgrounds, creating similar effects as the old masters; namely, the chosen subject is made visible in all its naked beauty. The wondrous power of Diana’s art is twofold: on the one hand, it conveys beauty and strength and nudges us to think deeply; on the other hand, it effortlessly brings happiness to anyone who looks at it.
Diana is a photographer who follows her intuition to create her artwork as she works, without envisioning the result a forehand. She seeks the magic of light, so she says, to reveal all of the beauty life has to offer. All the beauty of the inanimate and of daily life grasps her attention. It is this beauty that inspires her to create her unique photographic still lifes.
As she works only with natural light she needs to be
continually alert, always aware that the moments that magic
happens are brief, and so can too easily pass before she’s
noticed. She seeks those brief moments when natural light
performs its magic: light on the petals of an almost wilted
tulip, a ray of sunlight on a person’s skin, a reflection on
water or on a single blade of grass. She is extremely pleased when in these brief moments the shutter of her camera is open and focused. Her camera is always by her side.
Her work conveys a sense of melancholy, perhaps unconsciously, related to the conviction that these moments, in their brief existence, represent the transient fragile nature of life.
This melancholy makes her images strong but still so soft. This holds in particular for her images of people in which she captures a feeling of resignation, a stillness that forces the viewer to hold their gaze.
Diana grew up on a barge (inland vessel), sailing over the rivers and canals in countries such as Belgium, France and Germany and of course in her own country The Netherlands. She experienced many of these magical moments, still without a camera, watching life on land pass by, learning to recognize the special moments as they manifest themselves.
In her adult life she captures these moments in an ongoing series on the lives of her children as they grow up or for example in a snapshot of a few daffodils in a vase.
For many years she is living in the village Rossum in the province of Gelderland on the Waal River, one of the rivers on which she sailed as a child. In this river landscape Diana thrives on an almost overabundance of moments in which that light manifests itself.