Diana Marye Huff
Illustrator, Writer, Painter
i was born in Los Angeles California and attended Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, CA) School of Visual Arts (NYC) and Art Students League (NYC). i pursued both fine art and commercial art. my career began in New York illustrating for Henri Bendel, then later at Bloomingdales. the Christmas plates i designed are still floating around the internet. i wrote and illustrated a series of ads for Shoebiz which ran monthly in the New Yorker. i was encouraged to segue into shoe design, which i did.
my next adventure began with a 25 ft fully illustrated paper panel depicting a children’s lifestyle collection. i researched designers looking for someone with matching sensibilities and a really good sense of humor. Geoffrey Beene quite liked what i had done and was highly amused, as it took very heavy ashtrays to secure the panel to the showroom floor. the collection would have required 50 licensees so instead i was hired to illustrate and write press kits and work in the design studio. Mr. Beene recognized my talent for shoes so off to Italy i went where i learned the craft of shoe design and at last i found my niche. too much snow and travel, so i picked up the cat and off we went to San Francisco. initially i designed shoes for Susie Tompkins at Espirit but the next chapter was about to unfold.
a creative director at an ad agency asked me to paint his boyhood in Maine on a chair. thus began a ten year (it continues to today) journey into painting stories either the client’s or mine on vintage wooden objects or complete dining room sets. i got a call from Marshall Fields in Chicago who asked me to re-create Cinderella in 3-d for the Christmas windows. this assignment encompassed all the characters, furniture and costumes so they could be actualized by the various artisans. there was a “complete Cinderella story tour”, then they blew up the original drawings and placed them in the top floor windows of the store. i have continued to do bespoke furniture, custom books to celebrate a client’s family events, fashion illustration from yoga books to wedding toasts.
what has piqued my interest in children’s books is the emergence of writers, playwrights and poets collaborating with painters to create books. this collaboration to me is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling and Kenneth Grahame, where the writer and the illustrator were a perfect match. i collect both vintage and new children’s books which has prompted me to enter this field.
some of my favorite things: cats, pine trees, alligators, paintings by toulouse lautrec, hokusai prints, hiroshi sugimoto photographs, books by stephan zweig, honore balzac, and donna tartt. i listen to carla bruni, mozart, robert johnson,… my heroines: jane goodall, annie novak, ruth bader ginsburg, kate mc kinnon as ruth bader ginsburg or anything kate does… my heros are chuck jones and stephan hawking