Lifepod S01E03
Dianna Settles
Air date: March 25th, 2026

Adam Greenfield: Welcome to Lifepod, the podcast about taking care of ourselves in a world on fire. I'm your host, Adam Greenfield.

If you're much at all like me, you have complicated feelings about art, and particularly about painting. But every once in a long while, if you're lucky, you're exposed to a painting that takes you right down to the foundations, in the way that we're told art is supposed to. For me, this happened a few years ago, in the summer of 2022, when my partner and I were walking down Avenue A, in the East Village neighborhood of New York City.

When I was at NYU in the mid-'80s, I lived in the East Village — on East 7th Street, specifically, between Avenues B and C. And those were years when this part of town was just shot through with the spaces where culture is made, with storefront galleries and zine shops and illegal performance venues. Some other time, maybe we can talk about what I regard as the necessary connection between cheap or free real estate and cultural production. But for now, my point is simply that New York City, or anyway Manhattan, hasn't been that way for a long, long time.

There has been, for many years, a West Chelsea gallery scene, and that, fairly or not, often feels to me like it's curated for an international audience of collectors who understand art primarily as an asset class. But the idea that something on Avenue A might still be plugged into the world in the 2020s was already kind of mindblowing. And then we passed the window of a little storefront gallery called MARCH, right around the corner from the block of 5th Street where my friend Anthony lived for fifteen years or so.

In the window, it said "A LIFE WORTH LIVING WOULD BE A LIFE WORTH LIVING," and that was already intriguing enough to pull us in off the street. What we found when we got inside, though, was electric. The show was a series of paintings that depicted the everyday conviviality of people and animals living together, engaged in the project of life. And not abstractly, but in a way I recognized — in fact, through specific struggles I recognized. I have to confess that I just about jumped up and down at that point I felt so seen. And that's how I discovered the work of Dianna Settles.

Her visual language is one of communal experience, emotionally resonant arrangements, stillnesses that are as joyful or as grieving as they need to be, but with a tendency to use recognizable figures and situations as carriers of mood and memory and narrative. And when I say "recognizable," I mean in their specificity. If one of her paintings features a pair of sneakers or a chicken or a political poster, you know which one; if one of her paintings features a person — and we're going to get into this — that person is recognizable as an individual, right down to the haircuts and the tattoos.

Diana Settles, welcome to Lifepod. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. I'm so happy to finally get the opportunity to discuss your work with you.

Dianna Settles: Thank you so much for having me. It's so...I'm so excited to be able to have this conversation with you. I almost, um, I almost texted John to ask if you were going to have a British accent?

AG: This is our friend, John Robinson, who we know from Atlanta. Yeah. You thought I was British.

DS: I just wasn't sure! I was like, all the emails that I've gotten from you say that you're in London, so...

AG: Right, right. Did you read them in a British accent?

DS: Uh, yeah, yeah, I think so. Just like, super, super-thick Cockney accent.

AG: Awesome. Yeah. Somebody else said — um, he listened to the podcast and he was like, he expected me to have some kind of stentorian baritone. And I was like, "I'm so sorry to disappoint you." Let's, let's talk about your work, because I'm...I've always been so moved by it, and I find it so sustaining. But I really want to ask about the the way that you live. I get the idea that you've managed to forge a way of being that — in its communal qualities, and particularly in its relation to the land — a whole lot of us can only dream about. Can you say something about how you live, or about how you were living when you did the work that we saw on the gallery walls?

DS: So at the time that I was making the paintings for the show you saw in New York, I was living in Atlanta. And in, um, Atlanta, my life has been very, very, like, community-oriented. I started an artspace in 2016 called HiLo Press that, like, later transitioned into being a collectively-run project. And in 2019 I had moved onto a property in Lakewood in South Atlanta that some friends had started an urban farm on about fifteen years prior.

One of them was, like, someone that I worked with at the health-food coop, like, that was my first job in Atlanta. And so it was like this funny kind of like collapsing of worlds and time, the way that all things are. Especially once, like, lockdown happened, and COVID, I was having a lot of kind of traumatic feelings that were coming up. I, like, grew up really poor. I grew up hungry a lot of the time, and, like, the food-scarcity stuff was really, really dredging up a lot of these kinds of feelings. I thought...you know, I think that everyone has the, had these kind of, like, roaming imaginaries. Like at the start of lockdown, we were like, "OK, what the fuck am I going to do? Like, I can't have the type of social life that I'm used to. Like, maybe I'm going to, like, work out all the time, or maybe I'm gonna, you know, bake sourdough." And I thought, "I'm gonna paint all the time." And then I couldn't! I felt so overwhelmed. I was just, like, I was spinning, kind of, and, you know, I think that, especially in the start, people like, weren't really sure how to envision how to safely gather.

And so, you know, like, I felt lucky, because the kind of, like, short history of the farm is that the farmers who started it lived in the house that I was living in, you know, the fifteen years before, and they had become close with their neighbors on either side. And so the farm started to, like, split into those. And so...up until the '70s, that neighborhood was a lot of dairy land, and so the yards are really big. And so the, the farm project had, like, taken over not only the piece of land that that house was situated on, but also the two yards beside it.

They had dreams of, like, buying one or both of the other houses, because the landlord for that particular house that they lived in wasn't interested in selling. And they wanted some sort of, like, tie to longevity, and the landlord wound up buying both of those houses underneath them, which was like, pretty gross. But that meant that from early on, any time that someone was moving out of one of those houses, we had to make sure that it was like, friends or comrades that were living there, because we were like, "Well, the farm has to continue. And so we can't have someone that's, like, 'I don't want these hippies, like, [laughter] crawling around planting things in my backyard.'" And so I was lucky to have all this space where I was, like, regularly seeing at least the farmers.

And my partner first started helping out with Chris and Isa the farmers, and then they had kind of like scaled down, because I think they were, you know, thinking about, like moving on and trying to do some sort of, like intentional community. And we were like, "Well, we should start growing food!" And so we still, [laughter] we like, tilled up a big patch that hadn't been utilized for farming for a couple of years. We were so excited, and we planted a ton of stuff, you know, early on in the spring, and then a lot of the trees leafed out and shaded out what [laughter] we did and...but my partner Keelan had continued working with them, and then eventually became the sole vegetable grower on the farm. And so I benefited greatly from being outside, having this thing that sort of like tied me to routines and situated me in like exactly what was happening, like, climate-wise. Because we didn't own any of the land, like, we didn't have any permanent infrastructure, and so you're like, really, at the behest of the weather, and so that meant — we did dry farming methods a lot of the time, and we didn't have any, any irrigation. And so sometimes you're like, "Oh!"

AG: So you hand-watered everything that you see in the paintings?

DS: Yeah. So, um, we would typically, like water things like when we first planted or first transplanted, and then kind of like counted on the rain for the most part. And that was like — I mean, I'm thinking about all the types of, like, climate disaster that we see every day, but you know, we would have weeks of drought, and then we would have a month where it rained every single day, you know? And so you're at first, you're like, "Oh, finally water!" And then all of your vegetables are splitting open and rotting, and they don't taste like anything. And you're like, "OK, great! [laughter] What are we going to do now?”

And so I have always been a person with, like, a lot of different interests — I'm sorry this is such a, like, rambling, ambulating answer — but, um, I feel like one of the ways that I've convinced myself to sort of integrate different parts, or not, not abandon other projects is to, kind of like, in permaculture, people talk about "stacking function." So I like understood farming as being part of my painting practice. And like, reading is part of my painting practice, and jiu jitsu is part of my painting practice. And like all of those things kind of inform how I understand and approach the other. And, like, I feel like my paintings had gotten so much stronger, both from like, you know, knowing that if I'm making a painting that takes place in Kentucky in March, you know, it's like, there's dead nettle, there's daffodils, there's crocus, there's hyacinth, these are the things that are growing, these are the things

AG: Oh wow…

DS: ...that are that are still, you know, dead or fallow and, um, and also having to accept [laughter] and respond to lots of failure, was like another helpful part of painting. So, yeah, those, those things were happening, I was — we were figuring out how to continue having events outside. We had, like, lost the brick-and-mortar space that HiLo existed in for the first five years, and so we had a run of "HiLo In Exile" [laughter] where we were, like, doing shows in like, empty houses, an empty house for a little while. We did one in a tunnel, we did one on the farm, and then we started renting out the basement of the house next door to us, and like, that was our next space. And so, yeah, I think that I was always — I've always been trying to find ways to kind of, like, interweave a lot of different things in order to have, like, the richest kind of, like, most complex means of connecting with people as possible.

AG: I mean, you've basically anticipated my next question. You know, I think the logic of stacking functions is really, it really helps clarify my understanding of what it is that you're doing. One of the things that I love about your work is its, on the one hand, its intimate attention to what I think we might call the poetics of social reproduction, right? So that would be like people hanging laundry out to dry, breastfeeding, setting canned vegetables up for the winter, mending chicken coops, this sort of thing. And you know you could, if you were minded to do so, think of these activities as, as sort of trad, right? But then interspersed with them are these images featuring people engaging in activities that are generally pretty heavily monstered in mainstream discourse — people in black balaclavas and camouflage, building barricades, sabotaging buses, smashing the window at Tiffany's. And I kind of feel like one of your great accomplishments is to suggest that these are really merely two phases of one way of making a life, of dwelling together on the Earth. Does that feel, like, accurate to you? Is that what you think of as stacking functions, or have I gotten that?

DS: No, no, that's, that's definitely the kind of connection that I see between those, those two things, like, um — and I'm glad that you see it, because I feel like, especially early on, in me kind of taking my painting more seriously, it was like a complicated thing, because, like, throughout my entire adult life, I've had a lot of friends and, like, collaborators that I've worked on, like, different types of, like, organizing with, and a lot of them have, like, a very, very different relationship to art. And understandably, because, like, you know, like the things that you mentioned, like, it feels really isolating and gross and like uninteresting — boring! [laughter] — and just not geared towards most people. And so a lot of my friends that are more politically-minded, when you think of aesthetics, it's like, you know that it's important to have a visually captivating image to like, get people to come to the function, like, whether it's the noise demo, the punk show, the potluck, the film screening, whatever. And then beyond that, it's like, whatever — like, "We have more important things to do." And [laughter], and that's true, there is. There's more important things to do.

But I think that, um, it was always a funny thing to me in the beginning too, because when I would make the more kind of, like, spectacular scenes where there's like, people constructing barricades, or people helping themselves to the spoils [laughter] of other workers' labor, you know, of workers' labor, my more, uh, comradely friends would be like, "Hell yeah! Like, this is sick." And then someone processing a bunch of persimmons, or, like, a group of people processing a bunch of persimmons they're like, "Yeah, that's fine. Like, that looks nice, whatever," you know. And in my mind, I'm like, these are parts of the exact same existence, and the exact same, sort of, like, striving to be present and active and autonomous in the world, and to, like, build and share collective power.

AG: No, it really comes across. It's the, it's the greatest gift of the work.

DS: Thank you.

AG: [Laughter] No, I'm sincere. I mean, I really mean that: it comes through. It really does. I mean, I at least I'm not used to seeing either one of these phases in the medium of painted art, right? For all of the reasons you're talking about, um...How have you been received in the art world?

DS: I mean, I feel really lucky to have been able to make a living from making paintings for the last few years. I think I — like having grown up as like destitute [laughter] as I did, and also just being like, I feel like, at any given time for most of my adult life, I've had like, a surplus $50 where I'm like, "All right, that's it. That's what we got for the month," or something. And then, like, you know, you notice that, that rent is due, and I'd be like, "OK, I have to, like, do 12 tattoos, or I need to babysit, or I need to, like, design a t-shirt for a band, or, you know, do something just to, like, make that work." And I think that around the time that you saw the show, I think that there were a lot of people who were excited to be buying art, which was nice, and they were specifically interested in figurative art, and so I got to, like, ride that wave a little bit. And like, I think that I sincerely have connected with a lot of people who see something in the work that maybe makes them question the types of isolation that we all experience through most of our daily lives.

And I think that — I wouldn't say a majority of people have, kind of, like political foundations to kind of like understand the thing, because there's, there's so many, what do you call it? Like Easter eggs for people, for people in the know, you know? Like, at the last show that I had in New York, like, it was really fun to have people who I had never met, or never met in person, come up and be like, "That's my friend in that painting. Like, I recognize them," you know. And because of that, I can kind of, like, assume a lot of other things that they might understand from the paintings. Whereas, like, you know, some people are like, "This reminds me of my grandparents' garden." And like, you know, like, it's more kind of like a nostalgic thing, or maybe like a curious response.

I think that there have been a lot of like, interesting, like pleasantly surprising and like generative conversations that have have happened. And then there's also been funny things where, like, a lot of people who like, move through the art world as like collectors, and you know some like curators or appreciators, what have you, are under the assumption that artists should not say anything controversial.

AG: Mm. Yeah.

DS: And especially after the Al-Aqsa Flood, I had a lot of people who were, like, sending me crazy messages — because they were like, you know, I was like sharing about it on social media, and I did a run of prints of one of the paintings that I did that was like, you know, depicting the South River Music Festival in Atlanta, where a bunch of people are arrested and later charged with domestic terrorism. And I did that as, like, a fundraiser, fundraiser for people in Atlanta experiencing political repression, and also for medical aid to Palestine. And I was getting messages from people you know, who the only prior interaction online we had were, like, "Love the painting!", like, "This is great," or whatever — and then being like, "You're a terrorist, like, you're supporting this and this and this." And to me, it was so interesting to be like, "Wow, you really don't get it." Like, you don't understand [laughter] how anyone could, like, look through twenty paintings where, like, there are all of these kind of signifiers. You know, I'm not super-mysterious in the way that I like depict...

AG: Not at all.

DS: ...or, like, title works,

AG: No.

DS: You know, like, like: long paragraphs about looting. And, and then people are like, "What the fuck!" — like, like, "'Armed resistance'? That's crazy!", you know, like...

AG: I'm not gonna say who, because I don't know that they were authorized to say this, or would want me to identify them. But somebody who's in a position to know had spoken to me, even, of the, the attempt to like discipline you in the market by, like, dumping paintings to lower the value that you can ask for them around the time of Gaza, because of your moral clarity, right? I mean, or that's how I interpret it.

DS: I had a show that opened in Paris in September of 2023 and like, a bunch of the works had been placed, like, around the opening — you know, like people were like, "I want this one, I want this one." And then...I did not hear anything from the gallery [laughter] for a little, for several weeks, and later found out that I think six buyers had all backed out of purchases because they were like, "Oh, you know, we don't appreciate the things that she's saying."

It's kind of a, an intense situation where it's like — because I usually will have, like, one show a year. That's like, where I make most of my money, is, like, once a year, which is a strange sensation. And so to be like, oh, like, you know, "Potentially half of the money that I was going to make this year is, is no longer a thing," was really like, scary to me at first. But also is like, I definitely don't want those fucking people to have my paintings [laughter]. Like, like, if that's — if that's the case, if they're upset by me speaking out about, you know, something as like, evident as like, the complete, like, destruction of Palestinians' livelihoods, fuck them, one,

AG: Yeah.

DS: ...and like, you know, I can go back to babysitting and tattooing and doing art for bands like, you know, I'll figure it out.

AG: So I've got, I've got to ask — and it's sort of, I guess, a conventional, almost art-historian-like question — other than your life practice, other than the struggle that you've been engaged in, other than, uh, you know, the ways in which you make your living with with your family and your loved ones, what influences do you take with you into the painting?

DS: Into the paintings...I, I really love Bruegel. I like, adore Bruegel's work. Oftentimes, when I'm in the studio, I'll listen to different art scholars give presentations. And there's one person who — actually I thought that this question would come up, and I was like, I should look up his name so that I can, like, properly, shout him out; I didn't do that — but I've listened to a few of this person's talks on Bruegel, and one of the things that he describes is the concept of "convivium" in that work, as being something where, like, in order to paint a depiction of the world, your painting has to have depictions of every part of the world in it. Which is like a wild, impossible undertaking to kind of like foist on to a piece of art. But Bruegel got to work on a much different timeline than I do.

But I do feel like deeply researching and learning and knowing things, and then, like, making a painting of it. It does kind of feel like this thing where you're like, "Oh yeah — and, like, there's these bugs that are crawling around on the ground while you're doing this aspect. And this is what color this thing looks like, and this is what color the sky is at this time of year. And like, you know, these are the birds that are out. These are the flowers that are happening." So I think about, like the kind of chaotic, like density to those paintings.

I have a book of paintings and drawings that were made by Viet Cong artists during the war. And those are really incredible. And I think because they were — rather than, like, working with cameras, you know, it's like they had sketchpads, like in the field — and they're, like, these really, really phenomenal works. And one of the reasons why...I guess we haven't really, like, gotten into the process of, like, putting together a lot of the compositions that I make, but almost none of my paintings are just like, "There's a photo, and it looked like this, and now I'm making a painting that looks this way." Some of the ones that I'm doing for the fair are that, and it's like, it's so much easier. [laughter] It feels kind of crazy. But typically, like the longest part of making a painting for me is kind of like figuring out all of the kind of moving parts to the composition.

And that means, you know, if I'm thinking about a process like food preservation, and I'm like, you know, what's a what's a fruit that there's an abundance of, like, at this time of year that I want to make this painting of? There's a bunch of persimmons. What are the other things that are like growing during that time, like trifoliate oranges and spice bush. Then I'll think about who are the people who I want to put in this painting. And oftentimes the compositions are made out of people who have maybe spent a little bit of time in the same environment, maybe never, some of them living. Some of them are dead. Some of them are like younger versions of the same person who's in the painting.

AG: Ahh, wow.

DS: Um, and then I think about the actual kind of physical mechanics of these processes. And like, what shape does a body get into when shearing a sheep? Installing fence posts at a farm? You know, when, when fishing, when so on and so forth. And then I kind of like jigsaw, all of these pieces together where I'm like, "OK, I want there to be nine people, because there's nine parts of the process that I want in this and these are the people, because, I think, because I know that they appreciate this thing, or I think that they would appreciate this thing," and then I kind of, like, start contacting those friends, if they are friends that are living [laughter], and then figuring out, like, "OK, this is how I want you to be posed. Can you send me a picture of you this way?" And then, like, you know, accumulating all of my references — sometimes I'll make, like, really, really crude, like, Photoshop collages, which are, like, hilarious, if I think about it, I'll send you one where it's just like,

AG: Yeah, I'd love to see that...

DS: ...there's no background, but there's like a smattering of, like twelve people, just so I can think about the scale, and then I work on the painting. And because I'm like, collapsing all these different times into one plane, I feel like I have a little bit of room to act as like a historian for like, things that don't make sense to have, like, you know, physical documentation of, like, with a camera. Because a lot of people who I care about experience, and have experienced, like, really intense levels of state repression and surveillance. And so it's a way of, kind of like depicting things that have a lot of importance in, you know, these sort of, like global struggles for a life worth living and also maintaining like safety for these people, and not being, like, "And here's my friend smashing a window." You know, nothing like that.

But this just goes back to saying that those sketches and watercolors done by the Viet Cong artists are, like, really incredible for this reason, where there's like, you know, there's specificity and anonymity, yeah, there are people who are experiencing bombardment, and there are images of, like, living structures burning to the ground. And there's this one that sticks out in my mind, where it's a young girl sitting in this boat, and she is being escorted to school by two VC soldiers. And it's just, it's so bizarre and like beautiful and holds all of these, like, really, really complicated pieces together, which I feel like is, is more and more of like, what we're all having to try and make sense of every day in this sort of, like, Long Emergency [laughter].

AG: I could not have put that better myself! That's glorious. Thank you. You've also addressed something that my partner is always really curious about. She always wonders what your friends and family make of being so immediately recognizable in the paintings. But I gather that they, um, they're happy to be part of the documentation of the moment.

DS: Yeah, I, you know, I asked my friends if they [laughter] are OK with being in the paintings, and so I have, I have permission from them. It's funny to me, because I feel like the work that I make had this kind of snaking trajectory, where early on, when I was in art school, you know — the only thing that I wanted to make work about was my family and friends, and I didn't really understand how to do that in a way that was, like, compelling to people, because I was, like, with a lot of traditional portraiture, it's like, you know, it doesn't matter how well-rendered something is, like, there's a limit to your experience of it, unless you're kind of like seeing one specific thing, maybe, that reminds you of another person, and maybe you're having, like, more of an affective response because of that.

And so then I kind of like shifted to, when I started painting, partly because I had no idea what I was doing — I didn't study painting in school, I did printmaking — so because I had these very limited skills [laughter] and didn't really know how to use my tools, my paintings were like, really, really simplified, where you like, couldn't recognize like, specific people, and it was just kind of, like, there was a vagueness over everything, and it was like, this could be anyone, because it's no one, because it's everyone.

I think that there's much more of a connection that I feel to like the people who have these long-standing relationships or influence over my life, that I am more excited to make depictions of them. I feel more energized to make work with these, like, known figures to me, and I think that they hold such importance, influence, over the ways that I experience the world and the way that I think about, you know, the imaginary that I have for what is possible that it's really important for me to like have them be depicted. And it's funny too, because I include little details like tattoos that are on people. And so now it's gotten to the point where there's some friends that I've like painted so many times [laughter] that I'll see a photo on Instagram from like, a tattooer that I follow and be like, "Oh, I know that is! I know that leg tattoo!", like "That? That's Jade!", or "That's this person!" And I'm just like, so certain, because I'm like, it's, yeah, it's right there, and it's, like, next to this, like, tattoo of a chair, and there's a horse over here [laughter].

AG: But, I mean, there's so much love on the canvas. It is. It's really like the affects that traverse our lives, our communities, are not always that affirmative, but in some act of alchemy, somehow you transform all of the difficulty and the tension and the complexity of living amongst a group and a community into something that, on the canvas, has this extraordinary warmth to it — just the the way in which each figure is held and cherished. It isn't simply that they're depicted with, with precision, but they're also depicted with, I think, a kind of generosity that I'm not used to seeing, you know, painted on a gallery wall.

DS: Thank you. It's funny that when I'm making a painting, like, I want to include all of these tiny details — you know, like birthmarks [laughter] or piercings or tattoos or like favorite garments or something like that. I feel like, with those sorts of particularities, like, I am willing to spend like, endless energy on it, and then I will occasionally come up against things where I'm like, "I don't give a fuck about what this building [looks] like," you know, like, there was a painting that I did of, like, a guerrila play that happened on the lawn of the High Museum in Atlanta that some friends had, like, orchestrated, and it was incredible. But, you know, the building is just like, this big kind of, like, modern block thing, and it was so painful for me. I was just like, "OK, yeah, it's a bunch of squares, and that's fine," like, "You get it." I very rarely will paint, like cars...

AG: Mm.

DS: ...or things like that, because I just they're, like, not interesting enough to me to, like, really, like, dedicate the time to, like, all of these teensy, tiny moving parts. And so it's just kind of like, "Yeah. Like, you get the point." I'm not, I'm not super-concerned with, um, making something that feels photorealistic.

AG: No, I mean, the emotional architecture of the work is pretty clear. I have to ask about the other thing, which is that I love your titles. They're like little short stories. Can you [laughter], can you talk a little bit about how you choose a title for a canvas and what you're trying to convey with that that is somehow other than what's in the image?

DS: I had mentioned earlier, the kinds of other activities that I've like folded in to being part of my painting practice, and reading is one of those. And for me, reading helps me with making the paintings richer. Because, like, sometimes I'll read a passage of something and it, like, feels so vivid and descriptive that I'm like, "Oh, like...You know, this is completely changing, like, some aspect of the composition."

One of the paintings that I did of barricades that you saw in the show in 2022, I was reading "Communal Luxury" by Kristin Ross, and the, you know, like, there's the part about Gaillard père, who — Napoléon Gaillard père, the shoemaker/barricade artist — and like, who is, like, so proud of his work. And then I, I like, started looking up images — like these photos that exist from the Commune, where there are all the Communards, like, in their finery just, like, standing, posing, you know, as if it's like, you know, some sculptor with their creation, like at the unveiling of, in some, like, great institution — I was like, "Oh, I have to, like, put people in there who are mimicking these sort of poses," like having this kind of, like, pride of their construction. I think too, that it helps me, like, understand the actions that are being depicted as being something that is connected, is like part of a very, very long struggle towards like, a more meaningful and like, pleasurable way of, like, inhabiting the Earth. And so, when I'm reading a lot of the times, like in my notebooks, I'll just jot down like little passages of something where I'm like, I, you know, I'm not even sure, like, what this is going to be part of a title for, but it, like, it's standing out to me. And so sometimes the titles, they're usually two-part, and sometimes it's like a quote, and then, like, some sort of, like short response that I'm coming up with. Or sometimes it's like two quotes that I, like, pair together because of seeing, like, these funny parallels amongst the things that I'm reading, and like, the way that they kind of worm their way [laughter] into the end composition. And so sometimes there are moments where I'll be reading something and I'll know exactly I'm like, "Oh!" — like, I'm working on a painting where people are fishing, and like, this is a quote about oceanic feeling, and it's like, "I want that there." And like, that is is going to, like, ground the title for this piece. I have just, like, tons and tons of notebooks all around it's — like, not a very great organizational...

AG: For the listeners, she's just held up a yellow Penco notebook [laughter]. Scrawled upon in great depth.

DS: A friend told me that people are pilers or filers, and I'm more of a piler.

AG: You can't see the room that I'm talking to you from, but it is, it is a series of piles.

DS: Yeah, I feel like there's filing within the piles?

AG: Mm.

DS: But I have a lot of notebooks. And so sometimes I will get to the point where the paintings are getting ready to be, like, packed up for a show, and then I'll realize, "Oh, four of these are not titled yet." And so then it's kind of this funny thing where I'll grab my lists of quotes that I've made, and then I'll like, grab, like, a few books where I'm like, oh, there was definitely something good in here. Sometimes my partner is like, also, like, helping, like, hunt for things, where he's like, "Oh, I read something the other day and like that, I was thinking about that in regards to this painting that you're working on." And then it's, again, it's like a very similar sort of, like puzzling together where I'm like, oh, like, I'm going to put this John Ashbery quote, next to a quote from a piece that I read on Ill Will and [laughter] like, and here we are [laughter].

AG: Here we are. That's amazing. There's something that I was reminded of as you were speaking. It's really funny. I don't know if you remember these things. You might not even be old enough to remember these. There were these books that I had when I was a kid that consisted of, like, a glossy cardboard background, and then a series of transparencies. And you could rub the transparencies onto the background. So, like, the background might be like a castle in medieval France, and then you would get like, you know, transparencies of, like, British knights and French knights. And you could kind of rub them into place and make the scene however you imagined it. But you could also, if you were of this cast of mind, get a transparency from their, like, farm set, or from their, you know, like Detroit automotive-plant set, and like, rub those transparencies on. So there is this real creativity of composition. And it almost sounds to me that, like, in your — I mean, I didn't, I didn't understand the temporal depth of the paintings. I didn't understand that you were kind of choosing moments in time to laminate together. But I did get that there were these things that you had assembled from other contexts, maybe, and brought them together. And yeah, have you ever seen these, like, rub-on things, or am I like...?

DS: I have not. But that sounds cool. I'll try and find them.

AG: I mean, it's definitely, yeah, there's just something in the formal quality of some of your paintings that I'm like now, like, yeah, I get it. I get I get how that arrived that way. I've only got two more questions for you, really. What are you working on right now?

DS: Well, I'm working on these paintings for the Independent Art Fair, which is happening the exact days of the gathering at Woodbine — which I'm, like, I won't be able to be at the gathering the entire time, but I'm very excited that I will be in the right city for it. And so that is a group of ten paintings that I'm making. They're all sort of like the medium-size scale that I do, which is like 32 by 24 inches. These are more like closely-framed compositions, like I said — you can probably see, there's the background here. So there's one where I'm planting Ossabaw indigo, which did not work. I was really sad about that. I got Indian indigo and South American indigo to grow, but I didn't know enough about growing indigo at the time to make sure that these, like, recalcitrant seeds, were properly watered.

And then there's like another painting with some of my old chickens — that was from a birthday party that I had, and my friend was wearing these pants that had butterflies and, like, blades of grass embroidered all over them. And he wanted to go see the chickens, and so I brought him to the coop, and the chickens were like, pecking at the butterflies on the pants…

AG: No way.

DS: And I was like, "That's what we're all doing," you know [laughter]? Like, we're all just, like, trying to manifest [laughter] the things that we want into reality. Um, yeah, so there's, there's a number of, of these paintings. I think that it's like, been a challenge, because I'm not used to just like, like I said, working from like, one photo, and so I'm trying to figure out how to kind of impart these other details that feel like they have the ability to kind of, like, complicate uh, the, the setting a little bit more. There's a couple interior scenes that I've done. Yeah, there's a, there's a bunch of, of new ones. I'm planning to start a painting that will be hopefully used for a book cover for something that some friends are releasing later in the year that I can't say much more about...but it will be evident when the time comes.

AG: I can't wait. I've always dreamed of, like, commissioning you to do a book cover. And I've got, like, you know, I've got, like this, this new book coming out on — on Ill Will, Ill Will is doing a new press,

DS: Nice! Yes. Yes.

AG: ...but they've decided to go with this sort of graphically unified, you know, very abstract imagery for the covers. Which is too bad, because this book for them, you know, I can imagine that a painting of yours would have been amazing on it. Sometime in the future, maybe.

DS: Yeah, sometime.

AG: I can't wait to see this book, though.

DS: It'll work out sometime.

AG: Fingers crossed.

DS: What else am I working on? I organize these drawing sessions that happen here in Lexington every month, and we just had one on Sunday. We call it the Lexington Still Life Club. And I encourage anyone to organize these, because it's a really fun way to get people together. And basically every month we have a different — I invite a different artist to come and, like, put together a still life, and then people bring their favorite materials, and then hang out for two hours. And when I first started it, about a year and a half ago, the first session had 13 people — and I was doing this in Atlanta too, at HiLo, we called it the Atlanta Painting Club — but the first session, there were 13 people who came. And I was like, "Wow, this is a great turnout. It's probably because it's the first one. It'll probably like, dwindle down to maybe, like five people, and that's totally fine," like: "It'll be great." And it's only gotten bigger. I think people were, like, really excited to have something like this. And so there's regularly, like, 25 to 30 people. And at the one that we did on Sunday, there were 40 people. It was, like, hard to move around [laughter] the gallery, but that has been super fun. Um, I'm speaking on a symposium in a little over a week about artists in non-major, like, urban art hubs, and what else? I'm doing an interview with the folks at Heat Wave magazine like that same weekend.

AG: And the last question is, what are you reading lately? Since that your titles are so intimately connected to what your choice of reading material is, I have to wonder what it is that you've picked up lately.

DS: I was wondering if you were going to ask me that. I am currently reading "Hellworld" by Phil Neel. It is A Tome. I think it's like 750 pages, and I'm about a third of the way through. I try not to, like, look at my phone in front of my baby. So when I'm nursing, I'm reading. Which has been really nice, um, but that is like one that I can, like, only read when I'm feeling extremely awake, because I'm like, "If I drop this thing on her [laughter] as I fall asleep, like that's gonna do some damage." But, so, I've been reading that. I've been reading an Antoine Volodine book called "Writers." Are you familiar with Volodine?

AG: Not at all.

DS: My god, you have to read Antoine Volodine. Antoine Volodine is, is a pen name. I don't know what the author's name is. Someone on the internet apparently has been trying to, like, doxx him [laughter], but he has this project where he talks about "post-exoticist" writers, and there are all these kinds of, like, revolutionaries who are existing in various forms of imprisonment. And they have these like, very particular ways of like maintaining histories through different things called, like, "narrats" or "romåncès." And I would start — there are 49 books that are written by Volodine under different pen names. So there’s…

AG: Oh. Wow.

DS: The ones that I can think of off the top of my head are Antoine Volodine and Lutz Bassmann. There's one that I think is like Marina Something. Anyway, you should start with "Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons: Lesson Eleven," I feel like that book that was the first one that I read, and I think that it really helps, like, understand some of the, like, more bizarre aspects of the stories in the other ones. But I'm reading one right now called "Writers." And last year, I think I read — I read "Post-Exoticism," I read "Bardo or Not Bardo," I read "Solo Viola" and "Minor Angels." After I read "Post-Exoticism," I just, like tried to find copies of as many [laughter] of them as I could…

AG: It sounds like it, yeah...

DS: They're so moving. And actually, there's, like a good number of titles for paintings that are just imaginary titles by post-exoticist writers from that world. Like, there's one that I did last spring that's like, my friend Rona, and she's like, lock-picking cuffs off of a person…and that one is called "An Old Rebirth," and that is like on a list of titles of like, 350 titles at the back of "Post-Exoticism" [laughter]. And so I'm, so I'm reading one of those books right now. I started reading "Pig Earth" by John Berger. But I, when I when I was reading it, I was also reading the intro for "Hellworld," which has a lot about pigs, and I was like, "Ahhhhh, I have to, like, put this down!" Um...what else have I been reading? I've been reading a good amount of poetry, um, I just finally got a copy of "The Totality for Kids" by Joshua Clover. I had, like gotten one of his other books. I think it's called "Madonna anno domini," and I finished that one, like a few weeks back. I've been like revisiting his work since his passing. What else have I been reading? Oh, I just read "The Dispossessed" and "Left Hand of Darkness." Hold on, I have a list [laughter], because of course I do, of the things that...

AG: Lists and piles.

DS: Lists and piles! Yeah, like my piles are fairly organized, I feel like. Oh, yeah: OK, I read — oh, I've been reading a bunch of parenting books too. So I read one called "The Nurture Revolution," by Greer Kirshenbaum. I read "Braiding Sweetgrass." I feel like, probably twice or thrice a year I read "Revolutionary Letters." That is pretty much what I go to immediately when I realized that I haven't titled [laughter] something — I'm like, "Well, I'll just read "Revolutionary Letters," and I'll [laughter] find like, seventeen potential titles. I've been reading a good amount. I read "Fuel" by Rosie Stockton. I read one of Jasper Bernes’ old books of poetry called "Starsdown." I'm reading "The Future of Revolution" right now, by Jasper.

I read this really incredible book by a Kentucky author that came out the same year as "Grapes of Wrath," called "River" — yeah, "River of Earth," by James Still. And that — I'm like, not usually the type of person who just like, reads a book in one day, but it was like during a period where I was having to wake up every like, 45 minutes to nurse. And I read it so quickly, and it's so beautiful. It talks about a mining family during the Depression who, like part of the family unit, like, came from, like, sustenance farmers. And it talks about, like, how that transition came where a lot of people who grew all of their food and had this, like, very direct relationship with basically everything that they, you know, wear, live in, consume, had that shift during the boom in coal mining — because then there were, like, the company stores, and people were like, "Oh, I could make so much more money, and I can just buy these things. I can buy a brick of lard. I can brought, buy, you know, whatever," and how that was basically like something that really, really destroyed the ability for most people to be able to get back to that way of life. Because, like, and you, you see in the book where this family is just kind of like, constantly on the verge of collapse, because they're waiting for the mines to reopen. And you know, then it seems like they're not going to. And so they start to try and homestead again. And then, like a mine somewhere else, a few towns over, opens. And so they leave, you know — like the plots that they...it's like, it's really devastating, it's super-beautiful. So I would highly recommend that one also. But, yeah, you, you must, you simply must read Antoine Volodine.

AG: Oh, it's, it's a done deal. I don't often get recommendations that are that, you know, A, um, considered, but B, like, kind of stacked and ordered? That was a pretty impressive production.

DS: I wanted to talk about maybe one other thing that didn't come up in terms of how the compositions come together — just because I,

AG: It's your show.

DS: [Laughter] Um, so I, we were talking about the kind of, like temporal collapse, the kind of, the way that I started integrating some of the figures in the paintings who have been, who have passed. Because I think that when I'm putting together a painting, even if you can see twelve figures in it, and they're all very specific people, when I look at it, I see many, many more people than that. And I have figured out ways of, kind of like placing specific objects into compositions where it's like, you know, I remember this lamp from this person's room, or I remember, like, this necklace that somebody used to wear, or something, and so, like, they kind of find their way into everything. And I was struggling for a while with — I knew that I wanted to add friends and family members who had passed into these group scenes, because there's so many times where I've been in environments or, you know, like learning a process or something, and I'm like, "God, I know that this person would be so excited to, like, know that I'm doing this right now," or like that they would love learning this thing, or they would love seeing this thing. And I was really hung up on how to depict those figures in a way that clarified that they had passed in some sense. And so I was like playing with, you know, like, "What if I give them, like, a certain tone?" or something, or what if, that, you know, like playing with kind of, like opacity and all these different things. And eventually arrived at the fact that I didn't want them to be rendered any differently than any of the living figures.

And because, like all of those people are still materially present with us, like, as their breaths move through our lungs, and like their matter becomes [laughter], you know, part of everything around us. And so that felt like a really incredible privilege to be able to, like, put these people back into these scenes where it's like, you know, "I'm doing these things because of things I learned from you, and these things are happening because people whose lives you changed are continuing this kind of work." And I see, you know, the things that my friends and I are doing in the world as being like that same sort of continuation of...you know, all of these people will never, will never meet face to face, but we're here scooting along the [laughter] same kind of processes that they were doing, and that feels like an incredible honor to be able to kind of like play with those kinds of, those kinds of depictions.

AG: Wow, that's — the, that takes my breath away. Thank you so much for sharing that. Thank you so much for being on Lifepod with us, Dianna.

DS: Thank you, Adam! I'm so excited to listen to more episodes. And...

AG: Yeah, I think we're gonna get Kristin to — Kristin Ross, she's agreed in principle to do one. I think that if she's, she's up for it, then we'll do that soon. I do want to say, for the benefit of our listeners, that the event that we were talking about is going to be at Woodbine in New York City, Thursday, May 14 through Sunday, May 17. It's called "Lifehouses, Resilience Hubs and Dual Power, a space for practitioners." And it's — uh, the intention is to meet and think with those who are currently involved in movement and worldbuilding as we prepare ourselves for the uncertain years ahead. There's more information available about the gathering, including an invitation, at their website at woodbine dot nyc. And obviously I'm going to be in New York then. Dianna is, in fact, holding up a copy of my own book [laughter], which is vaguely embarrassing, but I'll live with it. I can, I can live through that. And I just want to thank you once again for sharing your time. You've been so generous with us, and I look forward to seeing you in New York City.

DS: Yeah, I really look forward to seeing you. Thank you so much for interviewing me and inviting me.

AG: If you're interested in what we've been talking about today, you might just enjoy my book "Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World On Fire," available directly from Verso at versobooks.com. Editing and audio engineering for Lifepod are by Laurence Green, the typography and graphic design are by Chris Lee. Thanks so much to Agriculture for permission to use their music. I'm Adam Greenfield. Until next time, remember: we are the ones we've been waiting for.