Diana Buitrago

My name is Diana Buitrago, I was born in Cartagena, Colombia and I am a classically trained realist painter who lives in Jersey City and works in New York City. The focus of my work is on both Landscape Painting and Portrait Painting from life. My extensive formal artistic training in the classical atelier method includes the four year program at the Art Students League, Artistic Anatomy coursework at Drexel University's School of Medicine, and the four year Core Program at the Grand Central Atelier. I have studied under artists Michael Grimaldi, Dan Thompson, Jon deMartin, Jacob Collins, and Colleen Barry. My work has been exhibited in New York in Eleventh Street Arts Gallery, Robert Simmon Fine Art, Salmagundi Club, The Phyllis Harriman Gallery and as well as at the Colombian Embassy in New York.

I now teach painting to the advanced students in the Core Program at the Grand Central Atelier. I also teach several online courses such as Studio Landscape Painting, Portrait Painting, Master-Copies and I teach private lessons as well. I’ve also taught workshops for The Art Students League of New York and in other institutions around the world such as Paris, Vienna and Mexico City. When I’m not teaching, I am at home painting in my studio or out traveling painting landscapes on Plein-Air. In 2018 I was awarded a Fellowship with The La Napoule Foundation which brought me to the South of France to paint the beautiful Cote D'azur. I’m also a four time Hudson River Fellow which allowed me to paint breathtaking landscapes in New Hampshire, New York’s Hudson Valley and Connecticut. In 2019 my painting “Portrait of a Young Dancer” won a certificate of Excellence from the Portrait Society of America.

All this experience has brought me countless hours of working from life and painting outdoors directly from nature. My experience as an instructor has led me to demoing many copies from the old master for my students. This and the study of nature has actually impacted my own work and my technique and this is what I would like to share with you in this course.

In my own personal work I try to show a high degree of technique and understanding of how the light affects the form of my subjects, whether it is a portrait or a mountain in the distance. I want my work to look cohesive and realistic because I have a high level of understanding of light, form, composition, etc. All of that alone will make for a very sterile painting, however. While I am a realist painter, I’m not trying to paint photorealistically. My personal style is to have a slightly more painterly effect upon my canvas. I want to show energy, life and personality in my brushwork, mark-making and color. I hope I can transmit this idea to each one of my students in this platform.