Atlanta-based painter, printmaker, and organizer Dianna Settles had just finished harvesting chestnuts and weeding the beds of indigo when we connected over Zoom to discuss her latest solo show, A Life Worth Living Would Be A Life Worth Living. On view at MARCH through October 8, Settles is the first artist to sow work across both the gallery’s glass-walled rooms.
These twenty works of acrylic and colored pencil on wood panel sprout indeed—from real life. Called “collective documents” in the show’s release, they interpret potential utopias through (and as) the idyll - the artist actually finds surrounding her–populated by plants, pickup trucks, even police brutality, but most importantly, the people she loves. Titles like poems complement them.
“All of the plants, animals, minerals outside speak the same way too, or else we wouldn’t be in the same world together, you know.”
Settles has been drawing her whole life, but at 18 a friend introduced her to printmaking. The structural nature of sketching and then lithography appealed to her. She studied the craft at the San Francisco Art Institute. Upon graduating in 2014, Settles traveled to Vietnam. She kept a notebook to document, in language, which color palettes from the culture struck her hardest.
This re-introduction to color made painting’s endless potential feel playful—not intimidating. In the years since, her work has centered around scenes of home with hues turned all the way up.
