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Diane Burke was born on December 16, 1919 in southern Georgia. While a Georgian by birth, she was raised in Central Florida after her family moved to the Sunshine State when she was very young.
Diane’s lifelong interest in the arts began budding when she was just a small child. Even then she dreamed of going college to become an artist. But her dreams, unfortunately, were quickly whisked away by the hardships created by the Great Depression. So after high school, in order to earn money to live, she instead decided to study nursing, which marked the start of her long and distinguished career as a nurse, nursing educator, and as a highly respected hospital administrator.
Diane’s impressive nursing educational background includes a BS degree in nursing from the University of Miami (Florida), a master’s degree in nursing administration from the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and graduate studies in pediatric nursing at the University of Texas. Besides working as a nurse, and later teaching various pediatric and obstetrical nursing courses at the University of Miami, her distinguished career in nursing also includes holding administrative positions as Director of Nursing at Variety Children’s Hospital in Miami, FL (now Miami’s Children’s Hospital) and Supervisor of Pediatric Nursing Services at Duke Medical Center in Durham, NC.
Since retiring from Duke Medical Center in 1984, Diane has, at long last, finally had a chance to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming an artist, and what a truly wonderful artist she has indeed become. Her preferred mediums are oils and watercolors, while her favorite settings are outdoor “Plein Air” landscape scenes, a painting style that Plein Air artists like Diane use in an attempt to capture light’s changing moods and effects on their landscape scenes. Although Diane didn’t begin painting seriously until she was 65, she is now recognized as an excellent artist, and is frequently invited to exhibit her paintings in art galleries in and around Durham, NC, her hometown.
When she’s not painting, Diane spends much of her free time attending art workshops and attending meetings of the various artistic and civic organizations she belongs to, which include, among others, the Durham Art Guild, the American Impressionist Society, the Eno River Association and the Triangle Land Conservancy. Additionally, even though Diane is now 86, she still thoroughly enjoys horseback riding. Even more amazing, she often travels to Montana with some of her close painting friends where they horseback into Montana’s rugged backcountry hills to find the most naturally beautiful and scenic setting for their paintings.
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