Guy Diehl, Drawings, Birdhouse Gallery
Take-Out Only
2020
Graphite on Renaissance-style linen-hemp paper
11.3in x 17.25 in
By Hugh Leeman
Guy Diehl's Drawings on view at Birdhouse Gallery showcases a realist painter contemplating life's fragility while working in graphite, charcoal, chalk, and rust on finely crafted, Renaissance-inspired handmade linen-hemp paper. Spanning five years (2020–2025), the exhibition situates pandemic-era take-out containers as symbols of isolation and adaptation, alongside centuries-old emblems of mortality and faith, arranged in constrained space adjacent to the table's precarious edge. Through shadowed layers and deliberate absences of tone, Diehl elevates the banal, imbuing the work with quiet introspection.
In a conversation with the artists, he speaks of the inspiration of the take-out containers, saying, "I saw all these plastic and paper take-out containers and pizza boxes piling up in my building's recycling bin during Covid. So I began using my own take-out containers and setting them up in my studio. It seemed cliché to do it, but after I did it, I liked it, and I thought, 'How do I fight against and push through the cliché?' The more I worked with them, the more I realized their potential. I wondered, 'What can I do for this period where we don't know what is going to happen? How do I document the uncertainty?"
Take-Out Only #2 (drawing)
2021
Granite on Renaissance-style linen hemp paper.
11.5 in x 18.5 in
Ultimately, the artist employed Renaissance-era compositional techniques and 17th-century Dutch still-life motifs to create geometrically sound pictures capable of capturing our collective memories. Beyond masterpieces from centuries long past, Diehl's compositions evoke the restrained sensibility of a 21st-century Giorgio Morandi, the 20th-century Italian artist best known for his muted, minimalist still life depicting quotidian vessels. Diehl speaks of his inspiration from Morandi as gradual. "Im a big fan of Morandi. I was at one of Wayne Thiebaud's lectures, and he would always mention Morandi. Initially, it didn't catch for me, but at a second lecture by Thiebaud, he mentioned Morandi again, and the more I looked, the more I saw. You have to be quiet with yourself."
Diehl's series, Take-Out Only of the single-use, disposable containers, collected during the pandemic, reflects on a pathogen's impact on humanity while reminding us of our shared ephemerality. Beyond the subject matter's connection to the pandemic, his renderings of the mass-produced single-serving containers could equally allude to the 21st century's culture of consumption and its isolating solitude. The disposable packaging testifies to the anxieties of touch and contamination becoming contemporary society's fruit bowl and serving dishes, commonly seen in the 17th-century still life.
Take-Out Only (Red Chalk #2)
2023
Red chalk on Century Renaissance-style linen-hemp paper.
10.75 in x 12.75 in
The works created on handmade Renaissance-style linen hemp paper made at Magnolia Editions, in Oakland, California, possess a texture and durability that become an artwork in itself, elevating a realistic drawing into an emotive visual memory, giving shadows a sculptural depth to lend an air of importance to the food containers, soon to become trash.
The paper is a perfect substrate for connecting the Renaissance's plague and the adoption of new ideas to the 2020s. Diehl says, "This show is as much about the paper as what I've drawn on it." His works offer continuity with convention through his use of chiaroscuro and gradation, yet the subject matter marks a rupture with tradition. The paper's archival permanence meets disposability, conferring historical weight upon objects of crisis and consumption.
Drawing's straight-on, frontal perspective situates the viewer as if we are in an intimate conversation with the work's compositions, which recall early Renaissance training in geometry and perspective that later shaped the still-life genre's spatial logic. At the time, the learned understood the mathematically sound shapes to be a manifestation of divine order.
For Renaissance artists, the circle symbolized God’s perfection and the square the earthly realm. Diehl's square pizza boxes and take-out containers recast the once sacred form as disposable matter destined for landfills. Yet, the sphere, sitting at the table's edge, connects with a 17th-century Dutch still-life motif in which the fragile nature of human existence could roll off the table, shattering on the floor.
Life is Precarious (Skull & Glass Marble) #2
2022
Red, brown, white black chalk on paper
9.25 in x 12.25 in
For centuries, skulls have acted as an overt symbol of Vanitas, a reminder of life's transience, the futility of pursuing earthly pleasures, and a visual reminder to maintain our attention on the divine. In Life is Precarious (Skull and Glass Marble) #2, Diehl employs such symbols; the sphere sits just a breath's whisper from the table's edge. The skull's matte density contrasts with the sphere's translucent fragility, establishing a visual dialogue between opacity and reflection, mortality and consciousness. Importantly, in this sphere, we see the artist's reflection staring down his subject matter, a historic motif of artists meditating on their mortality, pushing viewers to ponder the relationship between reflection and memory, art and reality.
The artist's experiences during Covid became a transformative chapter in his life, its gravitas becoming its own motivation, of which Diehl says, "My partner passed away during Covid, and this whole thing about our existence and the phrase we always hear, ‘life is short’, got me thinking about these artworks as Vanitas. I count my days, but I love what I do, a lot of it is subconscious. Covid showed us that life is short. I lost the love of my life; she was my muse, my high school sweetheart, and it was what happened after her death and during Covid that these experiences of life being short really began to register.”
Still Life Study with Glass Marble
2024
Graphite on Renaissance-style linen-hemp paper.
11.5 in x 12 in
Simple objects, as in Still Life Study with Glass Marble, backdropped by such stories, stir emotion and inspire curiosity. In the 2024 drawing, the vessels' liquids suggest medicinal tonics set in constrained space, aside glass marbles, prompting viewers to consider whether the vessels are half full or half empty. Though clearly evoking Giorgio Morandi, the piece set amongst the exhibit's pandemic-inspired take-out containers recalls the uncertainty surrounding vaccines, medicines, and home remedies during the early years of Covid.
Stick of Butter #2
2025
Steel wool rust powder and red and brown pencil on Renaissance linen/hemp paper
10.5in x 10.5 in
Diehl's subject matter takes on a dramatic shift in Stick of Butter #2. Experimenting with Steel Wool rust powder, the artist's medium becomes a message of aging through an image both precise and fragile. The packaging seen throughout the exhibition in this 2025 piece is finally coming undone. The medium of rust, as unstable as the butter it depicts, counterposes the butter's nourishment with rust's oxidation, suggesting that time is the true pigment.
Message in a Bottle (drawing)
2022
Graphite on Renaissance style linen-hemp paper.
13.4 in x 10. 5 in
Guy Diehl's Drawings emerges as a quiet meditation by an artist in his eighth decade, revealing a resonant honesty toward impermanence. "The purpose of my paintings is to slow people down. People walk away saying' They calm me down, they lure me in." Through rust and traditional mediums on handmade paper, he invites us to contemplate the nonmaterial texture of time, while expanding on universal themes transmitted through transforming the pandemic's take-out boxes into contemporary Vanitas.
His works succeed through a mastery of formal aesthetics that lure us in to consider the uncomfortable concept of mortality with an existential tenderness. As the lavish feasts of centuries past have given way to solitary single-serving meals, the artist composes an elegy of our precarious era, illustrating that even the most ordinary objects can reflect humanity's mortality and capacity for deep introspection as we collectively move toward the same vanishing point.
