Rebecca Diablo
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Aug 12
- 5 min read
Rebecca Diablo is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. She works with painting, writing and mixed media. Her images often feel slightly off, familiar at first but with something strange beneath the surface. She follows ideas that interest her, even if they don’t fully make sense at first. Her short stories have been published in literary journals and her visual work has been shown in Paris and LA. One of her recent projects is a short film called "The Dragoman Looks for the Lost Girl."
Q: You describe your work as living in the space where the familiar turns unfamiliar. What first drew you to that kind of visual tension?
A: Internally, I feel pretty chaotic, as perhaps most others do. We really do live in an age of hyper- and over-stimulation. Most of the time I feel like I’m blindly groping my way through reality. I think I try to work that out visually sometimes through shape and color. I can’t be sure, but I reckon all it does is take my mind off of the practical side of it. Maybe someday it will lead to some kind of understanding, or maybe it won’t. I’m not sure it matters. The process itself may just be the point.
Q: Your process seems guided by curiosity and ambiguity. How do you know when a piece is finished if clarity isn't the goal?
A: The feeling of “finished” is probably more of a soft landing than a definitive illumination? As I write these answers I think it’s at least a little bit funny how full of uncertainty I am, but alas, it’s the true, absurd nature of process! I don’t think it’s an uncommon feeling with most artists across various genres.
I saw a YouTube video once of a guy—an animator—(I don’t remember his name) who made these sort of corny, but endearing positive videos with advice for artists (mortifyingly, small YouTubers of this genre gratify a peculiar ASMR bone). Anyhow, he recommended one try to complete things at a 70%, as opposed to “perfection.”
It seems crass at first to put a number on something like that but I think it’s actually pretty wise, since really, you can work on something into oblivion; nothing is ever finished. Maybe I get bored, or the work stops pulling at me, or maybe it feels like the table is set, and the table becomes quieter. Some kind of frequency shifts and something in the image has been reconciled to feel aligned I suppose.
Q: You shift easily between mediums. What makes an idea call for one form over another?
A: I wish I were more conscious, had more autonomy in my own cognizance, to know how I make decisions in these respects! I suppose I simply have a vision in my mind of an image I want to work out, and it has texture or weight.
That might be instinct or it might be lunacy, or possession of the muses? Who really knows! Having a familiarity of diverse mediums certainly helps guide the volition of an image or image/object.
Q: In both your stories and images, distortion plays a role. Do you see a connection between how you write and how you construct visual work?
A: Definitely. I think distortion is a way I try to get closer to a kind of personal philosophical truth—by bending things just enough that they feel more honest than through precise representation. I suppose I’m aiming to depict how things feel, not just how they look. Distortion isn’t avant-garde, and neither is painting, really. Picasso famously declared, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” and yet painting has also been declared dead more times than anyone can count.
That it is no longer the zeitgeist of image-making doesn’t mean it can’t demonstrate poetry. I do sometimes worry that this kind of dandy poetry—especially now, during such intense political and social upheaval—is a luxury, reserved for the overly precious. But, I also think it’s one of the few places where complexity and contradiction are allowed to meditate and breathe.
In both writing and painting, I’m drawn to the points where reality starts to warp a little. I reckon that’s why I’ve always been drawn to magical realism—it treats the surreal, the fantastical as commonplace, which mirrors how the world often feels to me internally. In my visual work, distortion manifests in skewed forms and settings that misbehave. In writing, it’s a character’s illogical logic, or a strange detail that refuses to explain itself. The two practices constantly inform each other. They’re just different ways of pressing on the same bruise.
Q: What’s a recent idea or material you followed even though you didn’t fully understand it at first?
A: The most powerful ideas originating from clandestine reservoirs that I’ve developed recently have been written. I wrote a short film script two years ago based on a word I discovered, “dragoman” (“an interpreter or guide, especially in countries speaking Arabic, Turkish, or Persian”), and I’m finally gearing up to shoot "The Dragoman Looks for the Lost Girl" in August.
In the last three months, I finished writing a feature film. Though it was based on news events about a vigilante woman in Mexico, there was a lot of architectural filling-in I had to do to mature it into a fully developed narrative.
Q: You’ve shown work in both Paris and Los Angeles. Has the response to your work felt different in those two places?
A: Yes, definitely. My style tends to evolve pretty frequently, and that shift has shaped how my work is received in different places. I made more illustrative and figurative work in Paris, and I’ve drifted more into abstraction since, and I've been really grooving with the style of paintings I've made this year. It’s taboo to change styles as a painter and I know this. I feel very recalcitrant about this, but I know that my obstinance isn’t in my favor. Image-making is one tool I have to process the world around me, and it doesn’t make sense to force that tool to look the same every time I use it. Still, the pressure is real. As we all know, since the ‘80s especially, the art world has morphed into more of a capital market than a space for radical or poetic inquiry. That doesn’t mean image-making itself has lost its power—it hasn’t—but it can feel at odds with the systems it has to survive in. There’s an artist—I wish I could remember the name (I’m so bad with names)—whose work was painted text that made statements along the lines of, “Artists who get paid make figurative work.” He could’ve just as easily said, “Artists who get paid don’t change their style.” And there’s truth in that.
I think staying within a recognizable visual language makes sense for some people. Maybe I’m too distracted of a person to establish a relationship with a style. Lately, I’ve felt an internal push to try—almost as if I should muscle myself into following the etiquette of a party I’m not entirely sure I was invited to in the first place.
In the end, I think I’m still experimenting, still figuring out what feels true. I’ve even been thinking about returning to figurative work just as another experiment. Ultimately, I don’t think that representational figuration is a space I want to live in forever, though I don’t have anything against it. In fact, my favorite painting is a portrait: Meredith Frampton’s "Marguerite Kelsey." I suppose I’ll have to wait and see how I feel about it tomorrow.
