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Metro Detroit
FIVE THINGS: About a 'Mona Lisa' maniac
May 7, 2006
Diane Shipley DeCillis of West Bloomfield is an art gallery owner, a poet, a cook, a wife and a font of knowledge about the "Mona Lisa." ART AND SOUL
DeCillis studied psychology at Wayne State and the University of Michigan, but wound up a purveyor of art. She opened the Print Gallery on Northwestern Highway in Southfield 19 years ago. "I took an art history class in college and really latched onto it," she said. "I wanted some prints for my wall but couldn't find anyone who sold them until I went to Italy. I started buying them and keeping them under my bed, and just kept going." ACCIDENTAL EXPERT
She wasn't always a "Mona Lisa" maniac. "When I opened the gallery, I wanted it not to be intimidating to people," DeCillis said. "I wanted something that was a universal symbol of art, so I put her on my sign. People started coming in and asking about her. I only knew the basics, and then I really dove into it." She launched www.monalisamania.com in 1999 and has been interviewed by the BBC and "Today." DeCillis' gallery sells "Mona Lisa" prints, playing cards, T-shirts, aprons, coasters, magnets and beaded curtains. Hot new item: a Leonardo da Vinci action figure, $8.95, with paint brush, easel and mini-artworks. WOMAN OF MYSTERY
"There are so many questions about her, and so many answers," DeCillis says of Da Vinci's mysterious painting. "For example, why doesn't she have eyebrows? One theory was that in her day, it was fashionable not to have eyebrows. Another is that when the painting was restored a long time ago, the eyebrows came off." Check out the Theories section of the Web site for more. You can even submit your own. W.W.M.L.E.?
DeCillis loves to cook, and has given some thought to what Mona Lisa would eat. "I actually wrote a poem about what'd she'd eat," DeCillis said. "Da Vinci was a vegetarian, so I had them eating pastries with nuts and things like that. I'm working on creating a 'Mona Lisa' dinner party, suggesting wines and foods you'd serve. There'll have to be something like a Tuscan pasta with black olives." DeCillis also loves sweets, and her husband, Lou DeCillis, is a sweet guy -- he's the creator of Savino Sorbet, sold at many local groceries. He also installs artistic concrete floors, and did the Print Gallery's floor. Lou is currently in the Cayman Islands, working on a floor. WELL VERSED
DeCillis has been writing poetry since she was a teen. She hones her work in advanced poetry workshops by Springfed Arts, a local writers collective, and won Schoolcraft College's 2005 MacGuffin Poet Hunt. Last November she and poet Mary Jo Firth Gillett published "Mona Poetica" (Mayapple Press, $16.50), an anthology about the painting and about art and creativity in general. Contributors include American Book Award winner Thomas Lynch of Milford, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn and MacArthur fellow Edward Hirsch. From DeCillis' "Detail of Mona Lisa": Her mouth moistened by thin veneers of glaze, lip-glossed lips meeting to form an ambiguous horizon, the sun rising above them, cheeks blushed with soft carmine glow, sun setting as chiaroscuro in the shadow of her chin.
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