Diane Fine
American, b.1960; MFA 1988
Lives and works in Plattsburgh, New York
Detours, 2013, released 2016
Letterpress, digital printing and case binding with a fall away spine
The Moonkosh Press and Salient Seedling Press, Plattsburgh, New York
Edition of 28
The colophon—an end note from the printer concerning a book’s production—reads: “We followed several list-writing sessions with the meditative activity of sewing our selected texts.” After compiling over 100 phrases that began, ‘If only,’ the artists honed the list and sewed the texts onto remnants of found clothing. They wrote lead-in phrases that precede each text. The lead-in phrase for the text, “If only I’d let them know my opinion right from the get-go” is “conventional wisdom.” The images of the embroidered textiles vary from one copy to the next in the edition. The sequence of both the letterpress and sewn text is identical throughout the edition, but the particular illustrations vary to different degrees from book to book.
The youngest daughter of three, Diane Fine was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on Long Island. She became interested in printmaking and graphic design in high school and earned a BFA in visual communications from Syracuse University. There she made her first artists’ book, which was about her grandmother. After college, she took classes with Hedi Kyle at the Center for Book Arts and Paul Wong at Dieu Donné as well as a papermaking workshop with Joe Wilfer, who encouraged her to go to UW-Madison. Fine attended Madison from 1984 to 1988, earning both an MA and MFA, working at the Silver Buckle Press with Kathy Kuehn, and instructing undergraduates as a teaching assistant in the Art Department. As the proprietor of Moonkosh Press, she has published more than 20 artists’ books, and has collaborated on book projects with fellow UW alums Kathy Kuehn, Pati Scobey, Mario Laplante, and Tracy Honn. Fine and her sister Beth worked together on the book Forever & Ever, which illustrated how Judaism helped them cope with breast cancer in the family. Fine enjoys mixing the analog and digital in her books—for example, letterpress-printed type with digital images. She leads classes in printmaking and book arts at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, where she is a distinguished teaching professor of art.
