Arts Council’s Bob Diven portrait tour is Oct. 22

The Doña Ana Arts Council (DAAC) will host “A Portrait Tour” by award-winning Las Cruces artist and portraitist Bob Diven 4-5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22, at DAAC, 205 W. Amador Ave., suite B.

Tickets are $10 each, two for $15 and half price for students.

“In addition to being an artist and a painter, Bob Diven, who was selected as one of the Downtown Las Cruces Partnership’s first-ever artists in residence in 2020, is an actor, playwright, composer, singer, author and set builder,” DAAC Executive Director Greg Smith said in a news release.

Diven also is a national award-winning cartoonist who creates editorial cartoons for the Sunday Las Cruces Sun-News. A book of these cartoons, “Living in Las Cruces, The Editorial Cartoons of Bob Diven,” was published in 2020.

For “Portrait Tour,” Diven “will take the audience on a journey through a selection of 19^th- and 20^th- century portraits from some of the great art collections in Paris, Cambridge, London, Dublin and Chicago,” Smith said.

As a bonus, Diven will have some of his own portrait paintings on hand to illustrate the finer points of how they are made, with time for questions and discussion. 

The event is “a great evening for the curious, the art lover, and the art student," Smith said.

It is "part guided tour, part personal journey and part secrets of the trade,” Diven said.

"I'm excited to take folks along and give them a chance to see some great paintings the way a painter sees them -- not as an art historian, but as a working artist -- discovering joy, inspiration and a sense of kinship with the portrait painters who came before me," Diven said.

For more information, contact Smith at 575-523-6403 and director@daarts.org.

Visit https://daarts.org/.