Karen B. Tancil
Racine Journal Times
Thursday, March 15, 1990

Visual Tricks: What you think you see is not what you get

Lisa Englander engages in a bit of artistic sleight of hand.

First she has viewers thinking that her artwork consists of decorative papers adhered together.

When viewers get close enough to the works to realize that they aren’t made that way, she has them fooled again. They’re surprised to find that the works are done in watercolor, and are not prints.

The Racine artist has a show at Gallery 124 at the Kemper Center campus through April 1. Englander is well-known in the art community – she consistently gets into area juried shows and is represented in a number of private collections – but this is the first time that she’s shown her body of work in this area.

Later this year, the Rahr-West Museum in Manitowoc is doing a show that will cover 10 years of her work.

The Kenosha show represents what she’s done over a five-year period, she said in an interview.

The works are very organized and very precise, the boundaries of each color are sharply delineated.

“These take as long as they look,” Englander said. “I paint all the time, into the morning hours whenever I can.”

Englander works on several pieces at a time, because the paint must dry thoroughly before she can apply a contrasting paint next to it. Her studio is a spare bedroom in her Racine home.

She does not find the meticulous work tedious, she said.

“What amazes me is I come up with an infinite variety. I feel like I’ve got a backlog of 30 years of ideas.”

The show at Gallery 124 shows how she played with some of those ideas in the last half decade. She’s become more complex with her patterns. She’s made books using the patterns. She’s shaped the patterns into vase forms.

Her most recent pieces, hanging in the hallway, are long and narrow.

“I called the Mural Studies for lack of a better term because they do read like a mural.” She said of one of the ones in the hallway. 

All of the pieces are strong in color.

“This is a printmaker’s palette,” said Englander, whose undergraduate degree is in printmaking. “When you look at most watercolors they don’t have colors like this.”

The color, she said ‘is very spontaneous. I plan out in pencil what I’m doing, but I allowed the color in the pattern to be very playful.”

Englander said she believes there’s a figure ground relationship in everything.

“I always figured the paintings are the figure, and I am the ground.”

In her other life, Englander is the wife of Wustum Museum Director Bruce Pepich.

“I couldn’t have married somebody who wasn’t in the arts. I feel my life is so much in the arts. My life is very visual, “she said.

The museum is “my husband’s job, not mine,” Englander said “but I have a great deal of love for the arts so I put it in a great deal of volunteer hours because I want to.”

She makes a point not to be at the museum when shows are juried.

“I don’t get any perks by being the director’s wife. I need to be juried into shows just like everybody else,” she said.

She doesn’t get into every show she enters.

“I think the most important aspect of our relationship is being married to a museum director has given me the understanding of how a museum works and his being an artist’s husband give him an idea of how difficult my business is.”