Clouds burst as they hit the land, and purple and red-orange roads wind through country landscapes that are at once familiar and surreal in Diana Lehr’s brilliantly hued pastels and oils. Drawn to places where the elements in nature collide, the thirty-eight year old painter’s canvas reveals her fascination with this interaction. Lehr seems to paint as much from her mental interpretations as she does from her visual perceptions, resulting in scenes that go beyond the tangible. A quality of extremes and contrasts makes her work appear abandoned and free.

She loves the times of day when light changes, when colors are warm and bathed in surrealism. Green trees mystically turn to orange; blue rivers shade to deep purple. The winter light in Kaupo or the way the clouds tumble off Haleakala and hit the green slopes of Kula can absorb her total attention.

In recent years, Lehr has begun to travel more in order to draw inspiration from a variety of locales. Today, she generally splits her time between Pennsylvania and Maui, spending six months of the year in each place. Many of her paintings begin on Maui as sketches, which she then takes to Pennsylvania. Once she begins to translate those sketches into larger formats in oil, the creative process slows considerably while she works deliberately and slowly from them until they evolve to finished canvases.

While saving the world’s landscapes has never consciously been her intention, collectors of her work say they begin to see the world differently. A painting that at first seems too abstract to be real, with colors that never appear in nature, after awhile can make its owner begin seeing as the artist did. It becomes clear that at a particular time on a particular day, the sky really is magenta and the grass yellow. When a viewer of Lehr’s work begins to pay attention to the familiar world around him, to see the world in the way the artist herself perceived it, Lehr feels her work is complete. She has communicated more than what appears on the surface. She has captured her surreal landscapes on canvas in colors that are brighter than life itself.