Diane Hawley is a fine art painter based between Columbus, Ohio and Boca Raton, Florida, working primarily in oils, watercolor, and mixed media. With over 50 years of painting experience, her work carries the depth and confidence of an artist who has lived fully and painted through all of it.

Diane is drawn to subjects that catch her eye and carry a simple message, one that resonates quietly with the viewer. Her paintings are intimate moments of stillness: oversized flowers, teacups, landscapes and seascapes, interiors, and figures. Working at a monumental scale, she transforms the familiar and the quiet into something that stops the viewer entirely. There is an intimacy to her subjects, and yet the scale and technique command the room. The viewer is drawn close, and then held there.

Diane's artistic journey began at age 15, when one of her landscapes was purchased at an exhibition in Montreal by a Member of Parliament. It was a defining moment that set the course of a lifelong career in fine art.

Her formal training includes four years of weekly private watercolor lessons from a remarkable Dutch painter commissioned by the Canadian government to document the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Those years gave her a vision at precisely the right moment in her development as an artist. Her teacher was a man of extraordinary resilience, having survived years in a WWII prison camp, where he traded illustrations and portraits to guards in exchange for food. His influence on Diane was profound, instilling in her both technical mastery and an understanding of art as a lifeline.

Diane earned her BFA in Studio Art with a minor in Art History from Concordia University in Montreal in 1988. She has lived and created across Montreal, Vancouver, and Pennsylvania, exhibiting and accepting commissions continuously since her teenage years, including recent shows at Palm Beach Modern and Contemporary, Red Dot Art Fair during Art Miami Week, Petoskey Art Gallery, and Gallery of Hermosa in California.

Among her most ambitious works is a large-scale acrylic figure series painted on canvases measuring six by eight feet. The subject is figures in water, rendered with a quality that is at once ethereal and provocative, intimate and cerebral. These paintings ask something of the viewer, and reward those who linger.

A mother of five children, five in seven years, Diane's life has been as rich and layered as her canvases. Her fourth child developed Cerebral Palsy as a result of meningitis in infancy, and has grown into what she describes as "the most amazing human being," a source of immeasurable pride and gratitude.

Today, Diane paints full time in her studio, grateful for every day she squeezes out paint and gets to do what gives her life. She shares her journey through her Lives on TikTok and across her digital channels, inviting others into the studio and into the process. She is, as those who follow her will tell you, taking a big bite out of life.

"I am so grateful."