Diane Wolcott may be a grass-roots American and a ground-floor romantic, both of which she has been called by admiring critics, but her miniature landscapes with figures of children, nuns and domestic animals incisively project a picture of childhood that is ideal and universal.


The freshness of the rolling countryside behind her delicate figures is painted with the fidelity of the true observer. Indeed, in the private lens of her long-distance field glasses Diane Wolcott is able to create a mysterious quality of participation in the absorbing activities of her tiny child characters. It is only after the viewer has stepped back from a Wolcott canvas that he realizes he has been visiting the world of the miniature.


Diane Wolcott is the present-day representative of a family of artists who have made their mark in several of the arts. Her mother was Barbara Clough, a ballerina who danced in the fabled ballet companies of Anna Pavlova and Michel Fokine. Her grandmother was Jane B. Clough, a prize-winning student of the distinguished Danish-American sculptor, Solon Borglum. Her figures of children and animals may be seen in major art museums from New York to San Francisco.

Diane Wolcott has gone her own way as an artist. She has been painting since she was a small child and sold her first designs of European peasants in holiday dress to an interior decorator who was unaware that the finished drawings were the work of a fourteen-year-old girl.

Ms. Wolcott studied drawing, design, and dynamic symmetry at the Kansas City Art Institute. Later she traveled in Europe to observe, and dissect, but not to study formally.

Her style of painting is uniquely her own. At her first one-artist show in a leading Southern California gallery, half of her canvases were sold on the first day. This show and the three which followed were sell-outs. Many Wolcott paintings now hang in the homes of knowledgeable collectors throughout the United States and Europe.

To the cursory observer Diane Wolcott's canvases may seem simple, but only the unsophisticated could call them that. They are no more simple than are "Alice in Wonderland", or the murals of Giotto, or the works of the Nineteenth Century Pre-Raphaelites. The more perceptive eye detects the telling effects created by the artist's brush, distilled magically through the vision of the artist.
It has been said that where art is concerned, external sources are far less cogent than the hidden ones. This may well be true of Wolcott's projections, her beguiling and memory-provoking crystallizations in paint. The powerful magnet of the artist pulls the viewer of these Lilliputian paintings into scenes of childhood that he may never have known but which he recognizes through the painter's powerful magic.

Perhaps this is the golden key to the door that Diane Wolcott shows us. We can only be delighted that we have been invited into her enchanted world.