About the Artist: Dianne Dibb Forbis 

Born in upstate New York, Dianne Dibb Forbis received a B A. in Art from BYU. Currently residing in Orem, Utah, she has three daughters and twelve grandchildren. For twenty years she had full and part-time employment in the printing and greeting card industries involving advertisement ideation, product design and presentation, marketing, writing, and editing. For many years, she did formal art works on a personal basis only, exploring possibilities in tempera, pen-and-ink drawings, and collage. She was once employed as an elementary school art teacher and gave private art lessons to children. She also taught English in the California public school system and as an adjunct faculty member for a junior college, engaging in freelance writing and publishing poems and articles in regional and national periodicals. In 2000 her narrative poetry book about Alzheimer’s was published. After her husband’s death from early-onset Alzheimer’s and during her own continuing struggle with illness, Dianne returned to a determined professional involvement in art. Collage, her current medium and approach, is a metaphor, she feels, for her life task in recent years of having to pick up all the pieces and make something new and meaningful. Her work has been in shows throughout Utah. She has been commissioned by private individuals to do collages based on scripture. 

Artist’s Statement 

The technique I use to create “collage paintings” involves discovery and choice. I clip and assemble hundreds of snippets of photographs from periodicals. 1 use each small piece of color and/or simulated texture as a brush stroke of paint. The adhesive and binding material is acrylic medium. If, within a collage, I use a recognizable whole of any photographed item, my self-imposed rule is that I must add and alter aspects and change the image so that it becomes different—something unique with new facets or aspects that will make it an intriguing part of my newly created whole. Of course, the graphic relationships of all the partial images utilized become fresh. The process of creation is dynamic and satisfying. The collage technique—emphasizing dynamic interplay—seems to lend itself well to a subject matter that has interested me for sometime: dreams and visions as related in scripture (specifically the King James Version of the Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price). 

Front cover: Pharaoh’s Dream (Genesis 41), 36″ x 18″, acrylic collage. (God makes known the need for planning and preparation.) 

Upper back cover: Place of Security (Genesis 7), 24″ x 20″, acrylic collage. {The Ark story is also an allegory. Follow God’s directions and be safe in the storm.) 

Lower back coven Other Gods (Exodus 20:3, Deut. 5:7), 30″ x 24″, acrylic collage. (Here is indication of some of the gods—other than the Lord God—which we worship in today’s society.)