Martha Diamond, who captured the changing face of New York’s buildings, streets and vistas with simple expanses of color, died on Dec. 30. She was 79.

She began drawing as a child, and often accompanied her father, a physician, to hospital rounds near the Central Park Conservatory Garden. She remained awe-struck many decades later by the looming Manhattan skyline that appeared as they drove across the Queensboro Bridge.

Among her successes, she appeared in the Whitney’s influential 1984 “MetaManhattan” show as well as in its 1989 Biennial; she won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1980, and an Academy Award for Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Her work has been acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney, the MOMA, and the Guggenheim, among others.