The Small Pop Up Gallery Presents. Diane Englander!

The Small Pop Up Gallery. Diane Englander.

The Small Pop Up Gallery is proud to present the work of New York artist Diane Englander! The Small Pop Up Gallery featuring Diane’s work can be found at Beanz Espresso Bar at 38 University Ave, Charlottetown, P.E.I .

Diane Englander. Red on Buff. Mixed media on paper. 6×6 inches.

Diane Englander. Lines in Red. Mixed media on paper 6×6 inches.

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.

“I was brought up going to galleries and museums, a sometimes reluctant attendant to my parents’ passion for looking and for collecting. My own expressive energy must have simmered internally for years, occasionally emerging in photography, in quilt-making, in other tentative explorations, and certainly in providing opportunity and materials for my children to create. Not until those children were nearly grown did I come unequivocally to the need to make art myself.”

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 including those at the Hampden Gallery Incubator Project Space at U Mass Amherst in 2015, Cambridge Health Associates in Cambridge, MA in 2012, and at the Living Room Gallery at Saint Peter’s Church in Manhattan in 2010, as well as pieces 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.

Diane Englander. Orange on Red With Line. Mixed media on paper 6×6 inches.

Diane Englander. Almost Circle on Red. Mixed media on paper. 6×6 inches.

“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, 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 (and then maybe its remnants become a new jumping off place) when there’s harmony despite friction, a calm energized by tension.” DE

Diane Englander. Orange With Circles. Mixed media on paper. 6×6 inches.

Diane Englander. Untitled. Mixed media on paper. 6×6 inches.

Other material relating to Diane Englander.

Artist website: dianeenglander.net/

Moma P.S.1 Studio visit: Diane Englander

UMassAmherst: Diane Englander-Making The Next Thing

Have You Met?: Diane Englander

Lisa Pressman Art Blog: Diane Englander

Art Orbiter Artists Curate: Diane Englander

For more information concerning The Small Pop Up Gallery contact Stephen B MacInnis at, sbmacinnis@eastlink.ca