CAROL DIEHL PAINTER / ART CRITIC / AUTHOR Interview by Harryet Candee
Photography of Artist by Tasja Keetman
Carol Diehl is an artist, poet, and art critic with a long history in the Berkshires. Formerly a longtime contributing editor to Art in America, she has written for ARTnews, Art + Auction, Art & Antiques, and Metropolis, among others, and was an early slam performance poet at New York’s Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Her paintings have been exhibited at galleries and museums in both the US and abroad, including the Sidney Janis Gallery and Hirschl & Adler in New York, and the Berkshire Museum. She has taught both painting and writing at Bennington College and the School of Visual Arts Graduate Fine Arts Program. In addition, for over 20 years, she was a consultant on the covers for TIME Magazine. Carol has won awards from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, PEN America, and the Author’s League Fund. Her first book, Banksy Completed, was recently published by The MIT Press and is available in local bookstores. I met with Carol in her lofty, third floor studio with views of the mountains, and left filled with energy and inspiration. For Carol, the acts of painting and writing (as well as performing poetry and teaching) are not separate but intertwined, simply different avenues through which to explore that enigma we call art. And sometimes— perhaps just to make the point—you’ll find words in her paintings. All of this has come together in her very enjoyable book, Banksy: Completed, about the anonymous British street artist, a true provocateur, whose anti-establishment capers capture world headlines. Through Banksy, Carol reveals art’s relationship with money, power, and politics. After seeing the studio, we talked over tea, and 26 •JULY 2022 THE ARTFUL MIND
Carol shared the early experiences that led her to this singular perspective. Harryet Candee: Opening this conversation, I wonder what you think makes an artist successful in today’s world? Also, the idea that anything can be considered art… I’d like to have a deeper understanding based on your thoughts about the endless boundaries that define what art is, what it should or shouldn’t be. For you, being an artist and art critic, it must be very challenging. What are the Implications of being of modern artist now? What do we have to rethink? CD: What makes an artist successful in a worldly way has more to do with luck than art. On the
other hand, what makes art successful is a question that deserves to be constantly revisited. This subject has gotten more complicated as our culture moves away from identifying art solely with objects, such as painting and sculpture, toward an understanding that, as musician Brian Eno says, “art can be any experience that generates elevated ways of seeing, thinking, or feeling.” This is what I hope for through my painting and writing – endeavors that are not separate, but simply different ways of generating new art experiences. When you were working to try and save the masterpieces at the Berkshire Museum that were, sadly, ultimately sold, you wrote in these pages about the effect that being exposed to a
