Philipstown artist mounts first solo show
When Lisa Diebboll needs inspiration for her landscape paintings, she walks next door from her Philipstown home to a town park that has a meadow and pond. “It’s like a laboratory” for creativity, she says.
The artist’s first solo show, Between Observation and Abstraction, continues through May 31 at the Buster Levi Gallery in Cold Spring.
The Rhode Island School of Design graduate says the abstract and formal work together to make a landscape come alive — “all of sudden everything makes sense when you look at it.” But, she says, she has little interest in abstraction alone. “I need reality.”
“I’m looking for certain juxtapositions of shapes and colors, and I use them as my jumping off point,” adds Diebboll, who co-owns The Highland Studio, a fine art printmaking business off Route 9 that she established 28 years ago with her husband, Joe.
She studied painting and printmaking at RISD (where she met Joe, also a graduate of the school). “I love printmaking and the process,” she says. “I love that way of thinking about images and imagery.” The business “turned into a way for us to stay in the art world and have a career that could support a family.”
Lately, Diebboll has taken a step back from the printing business. “In the past five years I’ve been working to get back to my first love, which is painting, and it’s where I’m happiest,” she says. To reach that goal, Diebboll reclaimed a home bedroom as a studio.
The Buster Levi show includes 15 oil paintings, as well as prints and sketches. A few paintings are framed conventionally, but Diebboll otherwise used a light aluminum support onto which she affixes her works on linen. The aluminum is attached to wood that can be suspended from the gallery’s hooks. The result: a strong, light panel that is easier to store than the usual stretched canvas and can be displayed with or without a frame.
In the works, Diebboll’s greens and blues are in dialogue with salmons and pinks; some are energized by yellow and orange. In one small piece, a modest house peeks through trees; hills inject diagonal verve into others. Diebboll says it gives her satisfaction to explore the interplays.
Growing up, her family leaned into science more than art, but her father was an accomplished painter in pastels. She remembers being transfixed by her parents’ oversized art books, which she would spread open on the floor to gaze at the images. “I always wanted to put marks on paper and draw or paint what I saw,” she recalls.
Spying her young daughter’s interest, Diebboll’s mother enrolled her in oil painting lessons; she continued with the same teacher through high school. Diebboll’s own two daughters studied art but did not pursue artistic careers. One works in biological and environmental science and the other in the food industry.
The opening of her show on May 3 was “a perfectly lovely evening,” Diebboll says. She sold several paintings. “My biggest goal now is not to lose the thread and to keep going with the path that I’ve established.”
The Buster Levi Gallery, at 121 Main St. in Cold Spring, is open from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, or by appointment. See busterlevigallery.com.
