Diane Englander
Making The Next Thing

Incubator Project Space
March 3 – 31, 2015
Opening Reception: Sunday, Mar. 8, 2 - 4 pm

Bio:
A native New Yorker who works in NYC and Southampton, NY, Diane Englander had an earlier career including 17 years as a management consultant to local nonprofits concerned with poverty or disenfranchisement; work in NYC government; and several years as a lawyer at a large NYC law firm.

In late 2006 Diane began making collages that started her on her current path; in late 2007 she left her consulting job to focus on her artwork full-time. She has studied with Bruce Dorfman at the Art Students League in New York, and has had solo exhibits at Cambridge Health Associates in Cambridge, MA in 2012, and at the Living Room Gallery at Saint Peter’s Church in Manhattan in 2010. Her work has also been included in  group exhibits in New York City and elsewhere in the United States. One of her drawings is included in The Visual Language of Drawing (McElhinney, J. ed., Sterling Publishing 2012). In 2013 she won the Allied Artists of America award at the Butler Institute of American Art.

 
 
Artist’s Statement:
My work searches for the place between discord and tranquility, for the spot with a charged harmony that energizes as it also provides refuge. That search means I have to attack the prettiness of the initial painted surface, avoid balance, court darkness or stridency, invest a piece with conflict. Most recently my efforts, which began with collaged surfaces only subtly alluding to three dimensions, have begun to move more firmly into space. Both with knife slashes to the surface and with more prominent attached layers or folds projecting forward, as well as with unambiguously three-dimensional materials, I am reaching into your space as another way to create movement and energy.

As for the largely intuitive process, the material in front of me—papers, cloth, pieces of wood--influences my direction, as does inspiration from the world that we don't call art: a wall, a landscape, a window shade transfused with light, a stretch of sand and shadow. (And of course echoes from other artists, Burri, Vicente, Tapies, Motherwell, Rauschenberg, medieval cloisonné, Cycladic figures, Vermeer, Manet, Breughel, Nicholson, Scott, Blow, and  many more.)
After the crude line or slash or ripping that militates against utter tranquility, the piece is done, occasionally the same day, sometimes weeks later, sometimes never