Bruce W. Pepich
August 1, 1990

Lisa Englander:
A Decade of Painting, 1980–1990

Intense. Delicate. Elegant. Sumptuous. Exotic. Lush. These words have been used to describe the intricately patterned paintings and rich collage drawings of artist Lisa Englander. In 10 years, she has formulated a body of work with a highly personalized design vocabulary and a color sense establishing her reputation as an important contemporary Wisconsin painter. By continuing to develop her concepts, and refining her technical abilities, during this past decade, the artist has expanded the audience for her work to the region beyond.

Lisa Englander was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1954. She received her undergraduate degree in Art from Brooklyn College, where she studied painting with Lois Dodd and Philip Pearlstein and graphics with Paul Gianfagna and Steve Yamin. She moved to Milwaukee in 1975, to undertake graduate studies in Printmaking with Anthony Stoeveken at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. She received her MFA degree in 1979, and by that time she had created a series of etchings, lithographs, and small drawings, which set the foundation for her mature work to follow.

The subject of these pieces was the contrast created by juxtaposing conflicting elements. Massive inorganic forms of vessel shapes, or women’s handfans with their hard edges were set against soft shapes of floral forms. Hard and soft, masculine and feminine, nature and man-made, positive and negative spaces—these became Englander’s vocabulary. Her compositions evolved around the comparisons and dynamic design relationships she could construct from them. The massive vessels were streamlined versions of Native, Meso, and South American pottery she had studied. Englander’s interest in fans stemmed from a personal collection that began in her early childhood.

Shortly after graduation, Englander found that she no longer had access to a printing press. This quickly became an asset for the artist as she turned her knowledge of paper, and its many applications in the printmaking process, to the creation of a series of small-scale collage drawings. In these Fan Studies, Englander combined overlapping areas of handmade and imported papers in abstractions of fan and floral motifs with graphite and colored pencil drawings. The scale of these works alone made them intriguing, as the image area took up a mere 2 1/2 inches. By this time in her work, the fan was no longer an object to the artist but “also an endless fertile source of symbolic shapes.” ¹

The application of collaged papers in these pieces, derived from the artist’s use of the chine colle paper process in earlier prints and their metallic surfaces related to her use of metallic printmaking inks. There is a precious quality to the scale and surface of Englander’s early drawings, and all those that have followed for, “as modest in dimension, as they are lush in execution, they epitomize the taste and subtlety with which she approaches color and form.” ² Although these drawings were not created as specific studies for larger works, Englander did use them as methods to study composition and pattern relationships, which led to her experimentation in watercolor paintings.

In addition to her work in drawings, Englander began a series of watercolor paintings in 1981, in the most unforgiving of media, watercolor. Vanity Fair, 1983, is an example of these early paintings, which incorporated nine separate painted squares where different fan abstractions were filled with floral forms. The flowers, which spilled through the rotating fan shapes, were abstractions of down-growers, like Fuchsia and Columbine, causing portions of the work to disorient the viewer. These paintings were visually organized in an almost musical fashion. Sections of washes and color meet, connect, and stop abruptly, before changing to an entirely different portion of the piece like riffs in a jazz composition. The separate paintings making up the nine different panels within a single frame were “annunciating and restarting themes from area to area.” ³

Using her original concepts, Englander found a fertile field of ideas, which provided years of compositional investigation, and she embellished her original format with ever-increasing areas of color and pattern. By 1985, in works like Pictures at an Exhibition, she began to blur some of the distinctions between the nine panels in her pieces as abstract shadows and beacons of color traveled from one square to another, overlapped, changed color, and headed off the edge of the paper. She began to increase both the layers of pattern in and around the fan shapes and the color intensity.

For Under the Jellicle Moon and On The Idylls of Kings in 1988, Englander created complicated visual symphonies where colors crash like a symbol or blend sweetly like a string section. In the late 1980s, she enlarged her pattern vocabulary beyond stripes to include checkerboards, basket weaves, herringbone patterns, and florals, suggesting fabric or tiles. These pieces are shamelessly decorative and revel in their combinations of shape, color, and detail. The areas of separate paintings, set down into a rigid grid of nine sections in earlier pieces began to split, shift, and intermingle. The artist creates the illusion of real space in these compositions by overlapping patterned areas and darkening washes of underlying sections, suggesting shadows. There is a density to the color and pattern here that draws the eye, and will not release it. In Igraine, The Christian Queen, 1989, Englander replaced her former grid with a strongly centered composition of fans bursting through the planes of pattern, while smaller patterned compositions revolve in four outer quadrants. The white of the paper, which framed and set off the painting, is now incorporated in her work as part of the overall design.

The artist took one watercolor class in graduate school and the paintings of the past decade are the result of experimentation and investigation built upon those initial studies. Englander uses no airbrush. All densely painted areas are made up of multiple layers of watercolor washes. She can layer a painted area ten to fifty times to create the depth of color and luminosity of surface she desires, while retaining the transparent qualities of the watercolors. The designs for these paintings are not arbitrary, for she works out many compositional ideas in the Fan Studies. However, Englander does enjoy experimenting with color and pattern while creating these paintings. The general composition and color arrangements are laid out in advance. The designs are hand-drawn and hand-painted and no masking or taping of any kind is used to separate the different painted areas. Art critics James Auer and Dean Jensen have written about the flawless execution of these paintings, comparing their exactness to linoleum block printing, by saying that, “Englander’s watercolors most closely suggest ‘printerly’ paintings. They are so meticulously done that they almost appear to have been executed by a print press rather than a human hand.” ⁴

By 1985, Englander’s work in watercolor influenced her drawing through painted areas of broader, more intense color, and simultaneously, the drawings inspired a new series of watercolors. The artist had thought of drawing as small windows into a special place, pulling the viewer into the composition. The drawings were, “hardly larger than postage stamps. But she packed more splendor into these miniatures than some artists can get into 10 square yards of canvas.” ⁵ Englander’s concept of a window looking into a dense design, started a series of smaller watercolors in which a seven-inch square painted area, occupied the surface. Caerleon, 1984, illustrates the application of compositional and design elements she used in larger works like Vanity Fair in a format that echoed her drawings. However, by 1986, in pieces like Midian, Englander brought the border activity seen in her Pictures at an Exhibition to the smaller paintings, by breaking the designed and painted areas out of the confinement of the square.

Slowly, the size of the image began to increase from its original seven-inch square. In 1989, the expansion of Englander’s images reached a new dimension in pieces like Dragon Island, Alisander, and Sorhaute, where the painting governed most of the paper with dynamic and strong compositions. In Dragon Island, the presence of the fan shapes became increasingly less prominent as the overlapping planes of pattern vied for dominance of the composition. These paintings also derive their visual strength from the careful balance of harmonious and complementary colors further illustrating Englander’s abilities as a colorist. Alisander, with its spiky pinwheel composition, walks uneasily on stilts, teetering. Sorhaute, suggests the more enclosed compositions in their original format however, its outer edge is fragmented by stacks of painted panels, overlapping each other, as if in a kaleidoscope.

A 1986 invitation to create pieces for an exhibition dealing with the interior and exterior spaces of the Paine Art Center and Arboretum brought Englander’s return to the vase form as a vehicle in her paintings. She created a series of four vessels whose subjects were each one of the four seasons. The vase forms were made up of fragmented fan shapes, which were filled with different patterns in colors associated with each season. These large-scale paintings of urns were realistic in outline but created from shards of pattern and color, which defined the vase forms and continuously broke up their surfaces. Vessel Series #2, 1989, and Vessel Series #6, 1990, are monolithic in scale, but delicate because of the size of their surface decoration. They are solid and stable, but their surfaces are in constant visual motion to keep the viewer on guard.

As with her other paintings, placement is very important to Englander and these groupings of vase forms, like family group portraits, tell much about the relationships that exist between these still life elements. Some urns are overshadowed by others. Some are lost when they stand before a larger vase, and the shoulders and neck of the vase seem to create a sense of character for each vessel.

Englander’s visual interests include Japanese and Chinese art and textiles, pottery of the Americas, and the fabrics and designs of historic and contemporary costume. This can best be seen in her drawings of 1989 and 1990. Now titled Mural Studies, the drawings have kept the width of the original 2 1/2-inch format but they scroll like a Japanese painting for a length of 24 inches. She blends a wide variety of media with collaged papers to create a lush surface like a hand-painted silk scarf or brocade sash. The artist plays with the viewer’s eye by consciously blurring the distinction between drawn, painted, and collaged areas, until the work has one, seamless lush surface. The shapes cross and interact because of the increased space available to them in these new compositions and suggest that they could continue on a large mural-like scale.

Immensely pleasing in its color harmonies and craftsmanship, Englander’s work contains just enough compositional idiosyncrasies and changes in perspective to keep the viewer uncomfortable and not complacent. “In the end, however, Englander has put together a consistently interesting body of work – one that demonstrates once again, her amazing gifts, as a manipulator of a highly personalized, and instantly recognizable, design vocabulary.” ⁶

One cannot help but want to see what the next decade of painting has in store for Lisa Englander.

Bruce W. Pepich

August 1, 1990

1. James Auer, Shapely ‘Exotic’ Show, the Milwaukee Journal, Sunday, September 5, 1982.

2. James Auer, Of Fans and Animals, the Milwaukee, Journal, Sunday, June 8, 1980.

3. James Auer, Englander Show Fascinates the Milwaukee, Journal, Sunday, April 7, 1985.

4. Dean Jensen, This Feminist’s Artwork Refined, Elegant, the Milwaukee Sentinel, Let’s Go, Friday, August 27, 1982.

5. Ibid.

6. James Auer, Englander Show Fascinates, the Milwaukee, Journal, Sunday, April 7, 1985.

This essay was originally published in the catalogue Lisa Englander: A Decade of Painting, published by the Rahr-West Art Museum, Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, from August 5 – September 16, 1990.

Bruce W. Pepich is Executive Director and Curator of Collections at the Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin. He and Lisa Englander have been married since 1983.