A Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America, award winning pastelist, Diana Coidan, has been an accomplished and experienced full-time professional artist for the past twenty  years.  Although she works in many mediums, working in soft pastels is her most expressive, offering her the rich color, variety, and immediacy to paint her award-winning pastels.  A Business College graduate, Diana retired from an administrative position to pursue her love for art.  Self-taught and after many painting/pastel workshops with well-known instructors, she discovered her own pathway to expression in pastels and developed her own signature style with strikingly realistic results.  Diana’s paintings focus on movement with various sky/cloud formations, rhythm of the sea in its many forms, marine life, or the like, all evident of her unconscious attraction to blue.  

 

Recognized by many well-known jurors in local, regional, state, and national level exhibitions, Diana has been awarded place and purchase awards for many of her pastel pieces.  Her work can be found in private and corporate permanent art collections in the Raleigh area, including Duke Health Raleigh Hospital’s permanent art collection and Wells Fargo Corporate Offices.  With over twenty solo, and numerous group shows to her credits, she additionally has completed four commissioned wall murals along with seminar and brochure illustrations.  She was selected for the Best of State and National Artists Book receiving an Honorable Mention for a pastel, and her nautical pastel works are in the 2013 publication of Painting North Carolina, A Visual Journey by Kimberlee Maselli, Coastal Plains Chapter.   Diana conducts pastel workshops at Nicole’s Studio and Art Gallery and Jerry's Artarama, the Art Supplier in Raleigh. 

 

A Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America, Pastel Society of North Carolina,  Associate Member of the Women Painters of the Southeast, Watercolor Society of North Carolina, Fine Arts League of Cary, Carteret County Arts Coalition, Visual Art Exchange, and the Cary Gallery of Artists, Diana's work can be found at Nicole's Studio and Art Gallery, Raleigh, Mattie King Davis Gallery, Beaufort, Arts 'n Things, Morehead City, and as a founding member of the Cary Gallery of Artists, Cary.