Aka Diane Lane Root

An Abstract Expressionist in the 21 st Century

Matakia Biographical Notes

About the Artist

     Matakia, Diane Root's nom de pinceau , was born in Paris of an American father and a French mother, a native of Nice.   Schooled in the United States, Holland, Switzerland and France, she graduated from the Sorbonne.   As an artist, however, she is largely self-taught, with the exception of brief stints at the Beaux Arts in the French capital and at the annex of the Bellas Artes in San Miguél de Allende in Mexico.

     Although she never met the man she considers her principal mentor, she did encounter Picasso as a child, and later on, Matta, Giacometti, Zao Wou Ki, Isamu Noguchi, Manessier, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, all of whom exercised considerable influence on her art, as did baroque music, jazz,   poetry, literature, French Impressionism, American Abstract Expressionism, and both African and Oriental art.

While she has rarely shown her work in gallery settings, she has had several one-woman exhibits in Athens, Greece; Barcelona, Spain; Abidjan, Ivory Coast; Dallas, Texas, and New York City in the United States.  

Her works have been sold to private collections the world over, including Denmark, England, Holland, Italy, Spain, Morocco, Greece , Saudi Arabia, the Ivory Coast, Australia and the United States, as well as her native France.

Artist's Statement

"I am," she says, "what the French call une illustre inconnue ("an illustrious unknown").   Hardly a household name by her own admission, her works are nevertheless to be found in private collections all over the world.

Brought up in an artistic environment, replete with painters, sculptors, composers, musicians, poets, journalists and writers, the fine arts and foreign lands were a an integral part of the peripatetic landscape of her childhood, thanks to her journalist father.   Her appetite already whetted, she traveled to the Sahara, to North and West Africa, Mexico, Central and South America, Scandinavia, the Philippines, Turkey and all of Europe.   It doesn't take long to see glimpses of them all in the lifetime journey that is her work.   Everything, she says, is grist for her mill.

Like most children, she drew.    Unlike most children, her first subjects were ballet dancers.   By 11, upon disembarking in the South of France after a solo transatlantic trip on an ocean liner, she knew that she was--and would always be--a painter.

Affectionately called by her friends as Matisse Pastis in reference to her drawing style and her favorite libation--a habit she acquired during her sojourn in a Mediterranean village by the sea near Nice--she says that she seems to be a magnet for nicknames.   A beloved French nanny called her Miss (pronounced Mees) Mademoiselle, presumably in deference to her dual-national status.   One of her collectors insists that she looks like Gertrude Stein (alas!) and occasionally slips up.   Even her nom de pinceau was given her by a half-Greek, half-Spanish acquaintance who explained that matakia meant "little eyes" in Greek.   "It was an apt description," she explains, "besides, I liked the sound of it." She won't say what her parents called her, so don't ask.

Matakia is multilingual and versatile.   A writer and editor by trade, she explains her painterly side as being just another language in which to express herself.   "Writing and editing is what I do for a living," she observes.   "Painting is what I do for life."