Diana Guber is a scholar-artist who invariably draws her inspiration from the visual, literary, and musical arts. All her artistic productions are “dictated by inner necessity” to give her Heart a voice, and in so many forms, including songwriting and singing. Diana’s vision of music is expressed in elegant vocal delivery and brave modernity, resulting in an unpredictable style and theatrical quality, with a touch of European Romanticism sensibility.
Looking back on her childhood, Diana has always had a strong need for a poetic life, one filled with high ideals, visionary ideas and artistic expressions, longing for great elegance, moral probity and spiritual grandeur. As the descendant of the noble Kotchoubey family, Diana has cherished her heritage since childhood, and, above all, honoured the adherence to the wisdom of the ancients, as expressed in the literary, visual and musical arts of times long past. Her paternal great grandparents —Alexandra and Andrei Kotchoubey —had lived in quiet obscurity during the Soviet era in the southern region of Kherson, where Diana Guber was born.
Diana’s early interest in art and ancient culture was cultivated by her mother, a professional vocalist, who exposed her daughter at an early age to the sumptuous manuscripts, architecture, and sculpture in Kearch, where Diana spent her youth. It was an ancient Greek colony known as Panticapeum - the city of more than 2,600 years old, and the ruins of the site of Bosporus Panticapaeum were located on top of the Mithridates Mountain right in the centre of the modern city Kerch. Situated in an area rich in history, natural resources, and ancient architecture, it was a major cultural locus where the arts flourished. There was something hidden in the depths of the earth that radiated mysterious and powerful energy and produced prominent personalities of remarkable talent.
Diana’s father was an accomplished musician, who encouraged liberal thinking and exposed Diana to writings of Bulgakov, Voltaire, Kant and Nietzsche. As a man of the arts, her father was always on stage, on the move, and on edge. He inspired his daughter to look beyond conventional wisdom and to create the reality that more traditional or conservative people would find quite confronting.
It is thus no coincidence that Diana Guber has an academic background in art history, as she has earned her Master of Arts from the prestigious Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Between the years 2005 and 2008, Diana was also actively involved as a Docent Volunteer with Atlanta History Center, leading the tours at the historic Swan House. Over the course of the past decade, Diana has shifted her focus to musical productions, as she was formally trained to play violin and perform in her early years.
Diana has lived in the United States since 1998, but memory plays favorites, and Diana remembers how her parents, both professional musicians, struggled to express their artistic authenticity during the Soviet Union era, rather being confined to singing and playing patriotic (or folklore) songs in order to glorify the Soviet state, resulting in their creativity being stifled. Young Diana spent long hours backstage and at the rehearsals, during which musicians were secretly playing jazz, rock and other genres considered as “expressions of capitalist values” and thus forbidden at the time. Inevitably, this phenomenon has had a profound impact on her artistic visions, as she is combining elements of different genres and time periods in her own art, endowing antique stories with modern harmonies and heartbeat, and thus striving to create something new to exist in the arts.
Eager to find her own personal style and artistic stride, Diana has found a sudden inspiration in the Confucian ideal of the scholar-artist —literati— the scholar who was a connoisseur of poetry, calligraphy and painting. Based on the belief that “the ancients painted the feeling, and not merely the outward form,” scholar-artists painted nature not from a direct observation of the Chinese countryside, but rather as a result of their personal response to it. Preoccupied with the concept of a scholar-artist, i.e. literati, Diana constantly uses the Confucian tradition, by synthesizing poetry, music, literature, philosophy, history, fashion, and photography in a single work.
Sensitive to contemporary developments in the arts and aware of social and political events of the times, Diana Guber is yet interested in neither the unpleasant truths of modern life nor the social injustices preferred by many contemporary artists. Rather, Diana places great emphasis on aesthetic approach to the arts, admiring European artists, as she admits, “the Romantic tradition runs deeper in Europe than in the United States, and the relationship of European artists to human existence is more profoundly spiritual. I am closer to a European worldview, i.e. my ideals are based on a distinct European sensibility.”
In Diana Guber’s songs, the psychological intensity and fragility of her characters serve as a unifying element, whether these are historical figures (Lady Jane Grey, Jane Roberts, Vincent Van Gogh) or mythological heroines (The Muses, Daphne). In “Simulacra and Simulation,” Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), a French sociologist, emphasizes the widely adapted simulation as the conceptual justification and motive for a variety of contemporary art works based on communication theory, mass media, and the “appropriation” of historic images as aesthetic symbols. Diana’s subjects for her songs contain a personal allusion to the fact that she has long been fascinated by the history (and tragedy) of legendary figures, as she transposes those historical characters she subconsciously identifies with to the present-day world. She yet represents the iconic image in a new way vital to the contemporary times, placing the protagonist as if within an historical or mythological context and yet negating the accuracy of historical reconstruction, thus making the concept behind the image easily accessible to a modern audience.
Each song encourages Diana to look deeply inside herself, as an attempt to see what facets she is really made of, while posing profound questions in a larger context. These questions are similar to those of Vincent Van Gogh, such as “What gifts do I have that I can share with humanity?”
