Diane Thodos is a painter and printmaker who lives in Evanston, Illinois.  She received her BFA from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie-Mellon University in 1985 and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 1989.

In 1984 Thodos studied printmaking in Paris under Stanley William Hayter.  Working at Hayter’s Atelier 17, Thodos completed important experiments using automatism, similar to those performed by Jackson Pollock in the mid 1940’s.  This Abstract Expressionist method provided the basis for Thodos’ use of spontaneous lines and shapes to energize subconscious imagery.

Thodos was inspired by the powerful graphic techniques of the German Expressionists (1906 – 1932) after meeting Marcia and Granvil Specks in 1992.  Over the course of two decades, she was allowed to view their collection of over 450 prints and absorbed the ideas these artists demonstrated in lithography, etching, and woodblock prints.  Thodos focused on the Expressionists’ innovation of “painterly” techniques through which they created innovative traditional print processes used in biting etching plates, cutting woodblocks, and print making.

Between 1987 and 1992, Thodos was a student of the prolific intellectual Donald Kuspit, a New York art critic who inspired her to write as well as develop her art in the direction of Expressionism.  In the 2009 catalog for her exhibition at the Hellenic Museum in Chicago, Kuspit discusses the two salient themes of Thodos’ in art: expressionism and the female figure.  Regarding her turbulent expressionism he writes “Thodos’ Abstract Expressionism is jarring lightning like music, all the more so because its colors have an atonal resonance… [the tension] in fact energizes and finally explodes the image…” and “these works are a unique achievement within the expressionist tradition, not only because of their emotional impact but because of their innovated composition.”  On the female figure in Thodos’ lyrical works Kuspit writes “They are uncanny symbols of female self sufficiency…In whatever form the myth of the eternal feminine remains alive and well in Thodos’ art” and ”there are not many female expressionists (abstract or figurative), certainly few with the ego strength, expressive power, and intense conviction of Thodos, which is why her female perspective is a welcome and important addition…”

Complimenting Kuspit’s statements, the internationally renown German Expressionist scholar Reinhold Heller mentions “She makes paintings and prints, all bearing the expressive marks of her deep involvement and of her intense action on them…. Ink and paint are part of her. For her art must not die.”

Thodos received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and in 1999 was an Illinois Council for the Arts Grant recipient.  Her works are in many collections including the Milwaukee Museum of Art, Wisconsin; The David and Alfred Smart Museum, The University of Chicago; The Block Museum of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois: The Koehnline Museum of Art at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois; The Hellenic Museum, Chicago; The Strake-Jesuit Art Museum, Houston Texas; and the Specks Collection in Evanston, Illinois among many others.