Diane Charyk Norris
Drawn to Water
Date installed: September, 2025
Paintings, Drawings, and Monotypes
Artist website: www.charyknorris.net
Artist’s price list
We asked Diane if she would introduce herself and share a bit about her work, and here is what she wrote…
A bit about me: (Diane, do you want to try drafting something here, as a personal introduction to you and your work and/or approach? Take a look at our past featured artists to see how they approached this. There are no rules!
Welcome to the Mary Jo Rines Gallery: We’re delighted to welcome you to the Rines virtual gallery, and to the vibrant crreativity of landscape painter and printmaker Diane Charyk Norris. Diane offers us an arresting body of work that shares a theme she describes, very aptly, as “immersion in momentary passages of water”.
In the more than 30 works seen here, Diane explores the energy, rhythms, and reflections of water in motion. From rocky coastlines to inland streams, her watercolor monotypes, acrylics, charcoals, and watercolors capture fleeting moments of light, texture and transformation. Indeed, they all suggest fresh ways of seeing and engaging with our natural surroundings.
Diane earned degrees in both painting and architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. After practicing architecture for more than two decades, she returned to painting and continued her studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and in independent work with regional artists including Jane Goldman, Marjorie Glick, Joel Janowitz, and George Nick. She is a member of Mixit Print Studio, where she is currently focusing on watercolor monotypes. She teaches workshops in the medium and also has her own studio at Miller Street Studios in Somerville.
Her work is in many private collections and she has been featured in numerous shows, including New England Biolabs, Chandler Gallery, Paul Dietrich Gallery, Concord Art, Cambridge Art Association (CAA), Arlington Center for the Arts (ACA), and the Danforth Art Museum.
We hope you enjoy browsing through Diane’s work, and we invite you to come visit our Mary Jo Rines Gallery at Weston’s First Parish Church, in person!
Sincerely, The First Parish Art Committee
We hope you enjoy Diane’s work. If you’d like, you can click below to send her a comment or question…
Waves. Emerald Solstice…
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I’m drawn to the sea’s edge. The weather and the wild conditions. The sense of both chaos and calmness that coexist here at one and the same time. The adventure of it all.
Having explored the miles of rocky coastline along the North Shore of Massachusetts, on foot and as close to the ocean’s energy as I can get, I’m forever in search of that magical moment between waves and light…when the wave expresses its true energy and mystery. It seldom disappoints.
I hope you enjoy these three wave collections, in which for understandable reasons I see emeralds. Or feel the storm talking. Or enjoy the colorful gift of a day’s coming or going.
Waves. Dark and Stormy…
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Waves. Sunrise/Sunset…
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Abstract. Bearing Witness…
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While much of my work embodies the hard edge of reality, there’s another side, too. As a multimedia artist, I’m drawn also to the alchemy in the everyday…the sudden, unexpected magic of a sunset in winter; skies low and molten; the splendor of the sea at high tide, swollen and green and hungry.
In my abstract photography I want to remove these occurrences from their immediate context and imagine them anew. This way, we’re forced to wonder if we’re seeing them as they were live and experienced, or if we’re creating something entirely new just by bearing witness.
These pieces pose an essential question for me: is this the world we’re meant to see, or only the world we’re able to see?
Fishing Life…a Slide Show
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In my documentary work, I set out to capture the essence of work. I’ve always been fascinated with how people work, the connection they have with their job, and why they do it. I want to convey the rhythm of movement that the work entails. I guess it’s my way of trying to serve a larger purpose, bringing awareness to others for the greater good.
Living in Gloucester with its history of commercial fishing (it’s the oldest fishing port in the U.S.), I’ve chosen to photograph the waterfront workers. I realized I could show how we really get our fresh fish…and though the industry has suffered decline, worsened by both government regulations and depleted stocks, it is still a viable and important livelihood to many.
In this series of photographs, I focus on the work of the lumpers. They’re the guys who do the really hard and oftentimes dangerous work of taking the fish in, sorting the catch by species, and unloading when the boat returns. You’ll see some of this work here. The fishing vessel goes out to sea for five to nine day trips, catching what can range from 75,000 to 140,000 lbs. Taking turns, three lumpers dig to the bottom of the hold, each filling 100 lb. baskets one at a time. Working in a narrow hallway, the lumper signals the winch man when ready, and the baskets are hoisted to the dock.
Fully unloading a fishing vessel with a fish hold ten feet high and 30 x 30 feet wide can take them anywhere from 8-12 hours.
Inside the wharf building the catch gets sorted, boxed, iced, and placed on a palette by a team of people. It’s then loaded onto a waiting eighteen wheeler for the ride to Boston, where it gets unloaded and sold at auction.
It’s important to understand the delicate balance between this hard labor work and the fresh fish we’re still able to buy…without one you can't have the other. Large and automated commercial operations do not give us fresh fish! The fish is frozen on the vessel.
Understanding this and supporting the maintainance of our fresh fish fisheries is critical. And to that end, there is nothing more helpful, or exciting, than to visit Gloucester, watch a fishing vessel being unloaded, and buying your supply from the retail truck outside the building. There’s nothing like it.
(Note: You can learn more about the Gloucester fishing community and its challenges in this brochure from the Gloucester Fishing Community Preservation Fund. The GFCF helps preserve and promote awareness and foster the sustainability of a diverse independent fishing industry in this historic port city.)