Diana Guerrero-Maciá: Sky Blue Poppy and Dusk Poppy, 2026

J. In your studio, how do you compose a painting? 

D. There isn't a simple answer to that; composition is foundational.  I start with intentional collecting, culling, and setting limitations regarding my material and contextual boundaries.   Once I decide, I let myself compose in real time.  One thing I have been doing recently is making all my works in proportionate scale to a California king bed.  This scale helps put the works in a conversation with a sleeping body, which feels relevant to me–the works are sleeping giants. The ideas can lay dormant and will be awakened in the future. 

J. Can you describe the making of these prints in a print shop? 

D. It was fun. I knew that I wanted to make something like a flower, exploded.  I have made prints before so It was good to find out what processes were available to me.  We talked about scale, paper, and what qualities I wanted and landed on screenprinting.  I brought swatches of my hand-dyed palette and asked Angee to match those colors. She got those beautifully within the limitations of ink–you can’t capture some of the nuance of the dyed textiles in printed ink because light works differently on ink than textiles.  We adjusted for that later using en Day dots to create the illusion of a woven canvas that gave variegation of tonal colors.Angee printed large sheets of these colors and I cut them up and provisionally taped them into the forms you see.  We left traces of the activity, like the illusion to the masking tape, and added gestures of dripping paint by hand painting on clear film cut to the shapes of the flowers.  So there was a chance to create an actual collage and then translate that into a print. There are several moments that may confound the viewer: what’s in front? What's in the back?  A print is made sequentially.  These prints challenge that sequence visually.   I blew things up and put them back together–which is a little bit how I work in the studio.  It turns out we made screenprints with MANY layers (17 to 20).  

J. These days, what are your source materials and points of reference? 

D. The question I have is how can abstraction help me frame these times?  I'm having a hard time reckoning and reconciling with the current state of political and social affairs.  How do I go about referencing  this moment?  I want to make works that are timeless while speaking to the times.  I am a birthright citizen–it's a weird time to bear witness.  There is a lot of suffering and unnecessary violence.  So I'm using flowers as a stand-in for the body.  I asked myself, can I break a flower in the way tulips were broken by an unknown virus centuries ago? 

I’ve been writing short prose that is part autobiographical and part historical anecdote about how color operates.  My writing has helped me find meaningful spaces to work through form.   In the past I’ve referenced language from poems, literature and song lyrics.  Now I'm trying to generate that content myself.  I have healthy skepticism about my writing, however it is quite generative.

J. The prints include elements that occur in your work, such as grids forms and dots. What parts feel connected to your recent work?

D. Definitely the palette, and my interest in minimal, strong shapes and florals.  Flowers go back to an earlier body of work referencing mille fleur tapestries.  In that work, I was interested in how multiple symbols could populate a single surface.  In my new work, I'm interested in the power of the singular form.  Another similarity is the subtle use of making diptychs that are a-symmetrical  palindromes.  If you flip and invert the chromatic grey poppy you will see it matches the sky blue poppy.  This is something to do with acknowledging the absurdities of polarities. 

J. Can you talk about the Poppy as a subject? 

D.  For me,  abstract forms come from a distillation of the many moments so it's fitting to me to use symbolic flowers in our moment of crisis. Poppies are symbols of peace and death and/or a memorial.  Flowers are temporal, sexy, evocative, and resistant. They are economic and social-political drivers of culture.  The poppy has an attachment to remembrance, World War II soldiers who died.e are in another turbulent time; there are many challenges to democracy.  Motherwell made his elegies for the Spanish republic, over time, mourning the Spanish Civil War’s conflicts–The terrible deaths that did not need to happen.  His paintings were organic and geometric, and deliberate accidents. He made them as a memorial and called them a funeral song.  We have a song to sing now about the slow decline of democracy, not dissimilar to the rise of fascism in Spain.  As James Carville said in the late 90’s during the Clinton campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It's always the economy.