range from age five to well past retirement. As their creative
choices accumulate, her students gradually invent a style all
their own. She says her devotion to education and teaching
comes from a long lineage of educators extending beyond
the Mayflower Pilgrims.
“My ancestor John Cooke served as first School Master
for Plymouth Colony in 1649, and Sir Isaac Newton was a
second cousin,” Wallace writes in her online biography.
She began creating detailed studies in conté-crayon and
oils while studying with Dr. Maynard D. Stewart at San Jose
State University where she graduated in 1968 with multiple
degrees in painting, art history and ceramics, and minors
in humanities and music. Through Stewart, she learned to
master French academic neo-classical painting methods,
but ultimately developed a less formal style with natural
subject matter.
Wallace says her work has gradually “evolved into a loose
form of American impressionism with a modern twist.” She
worked sixteen-hour days for many years to master both
oils and watercolor techniques and discovered how to use
composition and design principles for the greatest impact.
She has won top awards for her watercolors and oil paintings
in local and regional juried shows. Her work has been
included in the American Watercolor Society annual exhibit
at the National Gallery in New York.
In 1977, when back problems hindered her painting
career, Wallace taught painting and art history at Shasta,
Gavilan, and De Anza colleges. Ultimately, decades of caring
for her disabled mother made home studio classes the only
option, so she took a hiatus from her own painting during
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
that time. Caring for her mother until she passed away
in 2013, Wallace has since resumed teaching in her rural
Morgan Hill studio and is once again producing water-
colors and plein-air oil paintings.
Wallace says she’s “smack in the middle of some big
style changes” as she experiments with “larger abstract
relationships between shapes, values and colors.” Seeing
where she’s been, it’s with great anticipation that we await
the next bend in her creative path.
Her original paintings and fine art giclée prints can
be viewed in her studio and online through her website.
Works are also on display at the Gilroy Center for the
Arts. For more information on classes or a tour of her
gallery, visit her website at dianewallaceart.com or phone
her at 408-778-6640.
Dan Craig is a local artist and
freelance writer who lives and
works in his downtown loft in
Morgan Hill.
JUNE/JULY 2018
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