By Shannon Hicks

Diana Baxter, her husband Steve, and the Baxters’ son, Keith, just celebrated their first Christmas in their new home on Walnut Tree Hill Road in Newtown. The artist and her family moved into a gorgeous house with a much larger yard and — even better for the artist Diana, owner of Diana’s Designs & Decor — a much larger studio space for the full-time artist this past fall.

Diana’s name may sound familiar to Newtown residents for a few reasons. When Newtown County Mill opened its doors a few years ago on Sugar Street, it was Diana’s handiwork that decorated one large wall of the fine arts and crafts business owned by Linda Manna (also home to LRM Landscaping, owned by Mrs Manna’s two sons), with a country-style mural.

Diana has also been busy in recent months filling the orders that came in once it became known she was using pieces of the original slate from Newtown’s Edmond Town Hall as the “canvas” for a series of paintings.

“I’m still working on the Newtown slate projects,” Diana said recently, sitting in the sunny kitchen of the home she and her family moved in to after 14 years on Pebble Road. She is no longer taking new orders for the pieces, which depict popular scenes and landmarks of Newtown during different seasons, because she is still working to honor the orders for the individual pieces that have already been placed.

Now in the fourth year of its existence, Diana’s Designs & Decor is busier than ever. The business offers hand painted items that can be used as decorative accessories, as well as faux finishes and murals that are custom created to make a space, however large or small, personalized. Diana is answering calls from people across Fairfield County and beyond who are looking to hire the Newtown artist to create an original mural for a full room or wall in their home.

She is also busy answering requests for commissions now that word is getting out among the business world about the work she has done at Universal Tile in Newtown and the firm’s new showroom in Westport, among others.

Newtown resident Dr Frederick Baff, VMD, the owner of Plumtrees Animal Hospital in Danbury, has also hired Diana. The mural in the waiting area of the Newtown Road business that Diana did last spring incorporated the veterinarian’s logo with a doghouse on one wall. Over a doorway is another painting by Diana, depicting a mother cat and her kittens playing.

Speaking with Diana Baxter is akin to talking with someone who is as wound up as a string of lights on a Christmas tree. She says she is tired, but there is an energy that surrounds her and a light in her eyes that belies the words that come out of her mouth. When Diana starts pulling pieces of her work off the walls or carrying things up from her basement studio to offer examples of her talent, she is instantly wide awake and running like a toddler with a new toy.

Her latest at-home project combines antique postcards, greeting cards or even photographs with contemporary antiquing methods and reproduction stencils. Diana has been scouring local flea markets and tag sales for months, coming home with images that are well within the public domain. She then makes color copies of the found images, changing the sizes on some, while keeping others their original size.

The images are then applied to canvas and stressed, which gives them an antique look. Hand stencils are then applied, using reproduction stencils that date back over a century. The edge of the canvas is then lined with a heavy, decorative tissue paper, and a matching bow is attached, and voila!, a gorgeous piece of new art has been created using something that has a base image of over 100 years.

In other cases, Diana applies the images onto pieces of wood which have been hand-covered with the art-weight tissue paper. One recent piece featured the image of Santa Claus, with a sack of toys over his shoulder, getting ready to go down the chimney. Diana had found the image at a flea market, created a color copy, and then added glitter to add a third dimension to the artwork, which she calls vintage print decoupage.

The Santa print was placed on a wood block that had been covered with dark green tissue paper, and the word “Welcome” had been stenciled across the top of the board.

“I make sure I use old prints, things that have no copyright and no signature,” she explained recently. “Each one, they’ll never come out the same, and that’s part of the fun of this project. [The images] stay true to their original character but they’ve also been given an entirely new life,” she continued.

 “This is a relatively new project, and I just wanted to try something new.

“It’s funny how people’s reaction changes to these projects,” she pointed out. “When you transfer it around, it seems to receive different reactions.

“You do something on slate or wood and it’s a craft. But you put it on canvas and suddenly it’s art,” she chuckled. Either way, they are gorgeous, original and extremely unique.

Diana’s work is sold at Newtown Country Mill and Lexington Gardens, both in Newtown; The Gift Cottage in Bethel; and Rowayton Florist & Gift in the Rowayton section of South Norwalk.

Meanwhile, Diana is still kept busy filling the orders for her slate paintings on the old Edmond Town Hall roof pieces, and also creating some of her trademark slate-roof birdhouses, although that period of her artistic life seems to be coming to a close.

“When I finish with the slate, I think I’ll be doing more of my work on canvas,” she said last week.

One of the nicest things about moving into the new house on Walnut Tree Hill Road is the larger studio space the new house affords Diana. She now has nearly the run of the basement in which to spread out her designs, the tools of her trade, and even the computer she uses for everything from organizing ideas and clients to keeping in touch with the outside world when she finds herself working into the wee hours of the morning, something that is not at all unusual.

“The basement is nice because I can do my ‘sloppy work’ down there now,” she recently shared.

Of course, the biggest projects that take up Diana’s time — literally as well as spatially — are the murals that have really begun to make a mark for the Newtown artist. She has been commissioned by homeowners for jobs as varied as trompe l’oeil scenes to make rooms look larger to fantasy scenes featuring frogs and fairies for little girls’ bedrooms.

One of her favorite projects was one she did last summer, at the Hankins home in Newtown. In addition to painting a scene of the family dog and her doghouse in the mud room, and a darling clothesline scene (which incorporates Diana’s painted-on pieces of clothing with thin rope and miniature clothespins to create a 3-D effect), Kathy Hankins hired Diana to paint a mural for daughter Brittany’s bedroom.

The fantastic wall painting encompasses all four walls of Brittany’s bedroom. A soft blue-green background ties the room together, and the walls are covered with fairies riding unicorns, frog princes on mushrooms, sprites, and other fanciful characters that belong in the room of a young girl. Diana and the Hankinses also wrote an original poem, which Diana then stenciled around the border of the ceiling.

“I knew I wanted a fairy theme in Brittany’s bedroom, but once Diana started working the mural turned into something that ran up onto the ceiling and encompassed the entire area,” Kathy Hankins said this week. “Diana’s flexibility and her openness with new ideas, or even when I didn’t like a particular color, just added to the ease of working with her.

“Visitors to our home are always taken by surprise, too, which is fun. They’re always oohing and ahhing, and asking who did this for us. It’s so unique. It’s custom art, and it really fits us.”

Kym Stendahl also found that working with Diana was extremely easy.

“All I had to do was show her a picture of an arrangement of flowers that I liked, and she was off and running,” Mrs Stendahl recalled this week. Last April, a few months after the Stendahl family moved into its new home in Newtown, Mrs Stendahl hired Diana to paint the wall tiles in her kitchen. Diana re-created the entire floral arrangement on one wall, and then did tiles around the kitchen with the individual flowers in the arrangement.

“It’s beautiful,” Mrs Stendahl said. “She does such beautiful work, and she’s very good at not only making something unique for everyone she works for, but she’s also very good at picking up the little things.”

A few years ago, Diana created a slate painting for the Stendahl family with four snowmen, one for each member of the family. There was a snowman to represent Mrs Stendahl, her husband Dave, and the Stendahls’ daughters, Alyssa and Kelly.

“On that snowman slate, she painted my daughter Kelly, who was still sucking her thumb at the time, as a snowman with a mitten in its mouth,” Mrs Stendahl said. “It’s just adorable.”

Commercially, one of her favorite projects is a pair of murals she did recently on tumbled marble for the recently-opened showroom of Universal Tile in Westport. One mural depicts a Venetian-type vase with giant roses and tulips, while the second depicts a scene of wine and a large bowl of fruit. The floral mural is five feet tall by three feet wide.

“The marble is very porous,” she explained. “It’s not shiny, it’s unpolished. It’s like painting on canvas. For me, after painting on slate it was very easy.”

Diana’s portfolio seems to be growing by the day, and it is impressive to show to prospective clients, but it’s more fun for Diana to visit her murals in person.

“To see these things in showrooms, so big, and sometimes bigger than life, it’s so rewarding.

“I miss my mural in our old house,” she continued, “but I have so many ideas for this house.

 “I have so many ideas for projects,” she laughed, sitting at her kitchen table and looking around at the walls of her new home. “I feel like I’m going in 50 directions at once.” Which seems true when one looks at the amount of work that has been keeping Diana Baxter busy lately; but the smile that comes with showing off her work says more than anything verbal ever would: Diana, a talented and extremely creative lady, wouldn’t have it any other way.

Diana Baxter/Diana’s Designs & Décor can be reached at 426-1401.