Born in California, moving often, and briefly living in a car with her mother when she was a child, artist Dianna Settles spent the majority of her childhood in Blue Ridge, Georgia, near her grandparents. Attending college first in Georgia, she graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute, and relocated to Atlanta, where she’s lived since. Parallels can easily be drawn between the patchwork of her early life, with its assemblage of locations and living situations, and her artwork, in which Settles unifies disparate moments and people into one painting. In much of her recent work, Settles portrays her life at Crack in the Sidewalk Farmlet—a sustainable homesteading community in Southeast Atlanta on what was once dairy farmland—where she’s lived with her partner for several years. While Settles paints from life, she creates community within her compositions just as she does in reality. She routinely invites friends and family who weren’t present at the same moment, have never met, or are no longer living into a singular frame. She knits together moments and actions that didn’t occur in the same location or at the same time. And sometimes, she will include a shout-out to another artist by incorporating a detail, like a tree or flower, from one of their works into her own.
Having worked as a kindergarten teacher, printmaker, tattoo artist, and co-owner of the collectively run Hi-Lo Press and Gallery, Settles is now able to paint full time. She keeps a rigorous schedule. Every part of her life ties into her art, and her art depicts her life: a conscious, thoughtful one that takes into account her impact on the molecules around her—living, breathing, eroding, and growing flora, fauna, earth, water. She exerts what might seem an unnecessary amount of effort to make readily available materials like gesso (which many painters prime their canvases with before beginning a painting, and every art store sells). Yet doing so deepens her practice and reinforces the connection to her lineage, as her maternal grandparents were also artists.
Settles’s influences are diverse. Politics, history, a meticulously constructed reading list, and art from all disciplines inform her work. Most crucially, a 2014 visit to Vietnam, where her father is from, significantly impacted her style. Artwork by Vietcong artists from the 1960s and 1970s made a huge impression on her. It was also the first time she’d been exposed to artwork full of people who looked like her but weren’t being fetishized or othered, which can often be seen in the West. Their stylized aesthetic impressed her to the point that she reevaluated her own realistic style and made an intentional shift in her work going forward. She acquired from that time a fresh approach to her palette, adopting a simplified method to portray the features of her subjects, and focused on making paintings about being Asian American.
The connections between Vietcong-era art and her own work are clear: her paintings largely portray herself, often with a group of people engaging harmoniously in labor, leisure, and training activities for the collective benefit of both those within their immediate sphere and the world beyond. Settles seems to delight in coming together with others around a beneficial purpose for greater humanity—and it has always been the point to bring everyone along, to obtain a better life for the greatest collective of humanity as a whole. But her work is not so much an aspiration or an urgent call to arms as it is an encouragement: Though we will need to fight for it, it is within our reach to live more humanely, ecologically, thoughtfully, kindly. Settles shows us how.
