INDIANA--Julie Bernstein Engelmann has been immersed in the art scenes of both Los Angeles and New York City.
So she was pleasantly surprised when she and her husband, Chip, moved to Indiana in 1991 and found that this small college town has its own thriving art community.
"I'm very thrilled with Indiana and the course that it's starting to take on the arts," she said.
Now a part of the local artistic community, Engelmann serves on the board of the Indiana Arts Council and is president of the Indiana Art Association.
A specialist in abstract painting, she is displaying a selection of her work through Dec. 1 in the Ambulatory Surgical Center at Indiana Regional Medical Center.
"I've gone back and forth, mostly with the abstract point-of-view," she noted. "My main interest is abstracts, and the landscapes I do really work as a tool to provide structure and make me less self-conscious.
When working on an abstract piece, she explained, "I'm looking at the paint as the thing I love most about painting, rather than what I'm trying to paint."
When she was just a toddler, Engelmann became fascinated by a piece of art in her mother's collection.
"She had this one painting that was hung low on the wall. It was nothing but cut dabs of paint, and I liked it a lot," Engelmann recalled. "I just loved the color."
As she grew older and was able to look beyond just the bottom of the painting, she realized the subject of the piece was a Spanish dancer.
"It just really struck me, the shock," she said. "I do think that because of that painting and my mother's advanced interest in art, abstract was really my language growing up."
Having lived and studied art on both coasts, Engelmann draws upon a broad background for her work.
Growing up in Wisconsin, she traveled to Europe several times while her father, a renowned chemist, gave lectures.
Her mother would take Engelmann and her sister to museums to see famous art collections.
"Art was just what we did," Engelmann said. "My mother had a wall in the kitchen that she used to hang our work on. It showed that it was important."
When Engelmann entered college, she thought she would follow in her father's footsteps as a science major. But, after two years, she transferred to the arts program at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City.
There, she was fortunate to have as a professor Milton Resnick, one of the first generation of abstract expressionist artists, whose circle of friends included Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
"(Resnick's) approach (to art) was very reverential of the paint itself and what it can do," she said. "And I've pretty much taken that approach ever since."
He also taught her to make sure different aspects of her paintings are all somehow connected.
"As I work, the parts seem to float together, where they were discordant at first," she said. "It comes together like a hologram. It was two-dimensional at first, and all of a sudden, it's three-dimensional."
Nature has long been a central theme for Engelmann and a catalyst for her creativity.
"I do love nature's beauty, and I do tend to draw from landscapes or photographs I've taken or things I've seen," she said.
"But I look at them as taking-off points.
"It's really the paint that's my inspiration."
Engelmann also credits the influence of her husband on her work.
She explained, "When I finally had the chance to make art my primary career, about a year ago, my husband and I started to have 'mastermind meetings.'
"We'd meet once a week and literally hold each other accountable to our goals and visions.
"You would not believe--looking at my logs of paintings finished and shows I've been in--the amount of work I've accomplished since we started doing that."
Engelmann's work has been displayed in two Pennsylvania Artists Professional Association shows this year. She was awarded Best of Show at the spring show and an honorable mention at the fall offering.
The Greater Latrobe School District recently purchased "Restart," an abstract acrylic by Engelmann, for its special collection.
"That was a real honor," she said.
"The students vote on works to purchase each year, which get published periodically in a beautiful book. The interesting thing is that the students have rarely selected an abstract painting since the 1960s, so this was a real departure.
"It helps to confirm my hope that my abstract work has a special quality that touches regular people."
(c) 2007 Julie Engelmann
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