Rediscovering the Muse

Schuppel’s paintings bring smiles, sunlight

Showing to raise funds for Angels Over Sandpoint

SANDPOINT — Brush touches paint. Color and line appear on canvas. Faces emerge as broad strokes hint at their features and let the viewer fill in the details from memory.

Witness the emancipation of Diana Schuppel, who has met art on its own terms and made peace with her Muse. The result has been an outpouring of new work that seems to be creating itself, even after the artist steps away.

“I’ve stopped trying to shove art around and make it behave,” Schuppel said. “I learned to let art be art, instead of keeping on and trying to control it and take it to the photographic stage. Cameras are cameras and paintings are paintings. They’re totally different.”

These new images, this new inspiration, stand in contrast to the body of work she was known for in the past — smaller frames filled with the elements of nature, all rendered in minute detail. In those paintings, clouds swirl, dragonflies bask in sunlight and flowers bend to the will of the breeze. They are part of what the artist calls her “whimsical” period — a time when she painted her way into shady glens and forest glades as a way to seek order out of chaos.

“I was escaping reality,” Schuppel explained. “So I created the loveliest of worlds for myself.”

Those worlds attracted an audience of people who were also eager to escape by stepping into this same place. They clamored for her to take them there again and again and began to associate the artist with the woodland fantasies.

Some artists would have celebrated the discovery of a niche market and mined it for all it was worth. Schuppel, however, felt as if she was being herded into a corner.

“There’s a part of me that never wants to submit to the public,” she said. “I wanted to break away from being ‘Diana, who does the happy bugs.’”

She did so by thinking big. And painting bigger. The small format watercolors that could be created on a tabletop were replaced by canvases that took up entire rooms in her home studio.

“Instead of the dainty tray of paints and a couple of little brushes, you’re shoving around paint cans and using big brushes,” Schuppel said. “It’s more intimate because you’re right up against the canvas. And, because it’s more physical, it has forced me to relax and open up.”

Her introduction to the larger-than-life painting school took place while designing set pieces for local theater productions — a chance to work on even larger canvases and a gateway to creating public art.

Over the past year, Schuppel has been working on a commission from the Priest River Chamber of Commerce that represents her biggest work yet, a quarter-mile long mural that depicts a century of logging history over the course of 158 painted boards in sections ranging from two to eight feet in height. Although the artist didn’t choose the subject matter — she was commissioned to complete a mural designed by another artist, Lynn Guier — she was drawn to the magnitude of the piece, which will be finished by next month.

“The whole idea was bizarre and wild and giant and I had no doubt I could get it done,” Schuppel said. “I thought it would be intimidating, but it actually helped me to let go of the imaginary intimidation of ‘The Viewer.’”

Working in the physically demanding medium of large-scale public art also brought her back to the watercolor table, where she has reopened the gateway to the world of fantasy and invited whimsy back into her life.

“I have — willingly,” the artist said. “I look back at two projects I did in that vein — the library mural and the Festival at Sandpoint poster — and there was a lot of love there.

“Instead of fighting it, I’m now thinking, ‘I always loved wings in sunlight. That’s mine and it’s part of my happiness.’”

The Priest River commission was timely, as it fell during a time when Schuppel was struggling with her art. The mural project forced her to work every day and saw her through a period of painter’s block, where she would approach every blank canvas or page with trepidation.

“It’s a panicky feeling,” she said. “There’s something in you that says, ‘Maybe you’ve used your part up.’

“Finally, after a year of seeking inspiration, it has returned on its own,” she added. “It’s not something you can order up.”

Like new growth in spring, that inspiration is starting to blossom all over with gallery showings of Schuppel’s latest work. This summer, her florals and nature studies will be featured in back-to-back ArtWalk shows at Petal Talk. The Dulce wine bar recently hung several of her large portrait paintings and four similar pieces are currently on display at the Pend Oreille Winery.

Those four paintings — created by Schuppel for the recent Angels Over Sandpoint production of “The Vagina Monologues” — have been donated to the charitable organization as a fundraising vehicle and are being sold through a silent auction that continues through the end of May.

“With the state of the economy, our assistance requests have quadrupled in the last month,” said Angels Over Sandpoint member Deborah McShane. “The money raised from the sale of Diana’s paintings will go into our general fund to help local people in need.”

Schuppel herself was once helped out by the group, which stepped in to assist with medical costs when she broke her leg in a bicycle accident.

“It’s an honor to give some of that back,” she said.

The happiness that beams from faces in Schuppel’s new paintings is a reflection of the artist’s own state-of-mind. She has dropped all ideas of controlling her work and is content to let art have a say in its creation. It’s a relationship that Schuppel finds hard to put into words, but easy to paint.

“Art surpasses boundaries,” she said. “You can speak with an image in a way that you can’t with language.”