Diana Moya Lujan has always drawn and painted using colored pencils, pastels, and charcoal. "I started with cartoons," she says and then began doing faces of older people because " you can see their whole life in their faces." In 1996 she took a straw appliqué class from artist Charlie Sánchez at the Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA). Soon after she was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and saw their collection of mosaics. For Lujan the two art forms "seemed to tie in," and she couldn't wait to get back home and experiment.
Lujan's
innovative blend of color, material and technique has created another direction
within the straw appliqué tradition. She incorporates different types
of straw and native natural materials in her art. Fascinated by the detail created
when rendering hair and muscles in straw, Lujan turned the tradition inside
out, "It was a challenge to me to do the reverse,"
and began to create silhouettes like the image in her Cristo crucificado con
Nuestra Señora de Dolores y San Juan Evangelista included in Arte
y Amistad. Lujan enjoys the artistic process and likes to play with straw at different angles and patterns. She says: "I want to be able to create a piece and have it look like paint, then when people get close, they will see it is all straw." Lujan used to collect Santas (not santos!), Lionel trains and sewing memorabilia. Now she collects work by other straw artists.
