Carol Diehl is an American artist, art critic and poet. In addition to her writing, most recently appearing in her blog Art Vent, she is best known for her paintings, which have often documented daily life in a manner described as diaristic, even compulsive, using dense, painterly, often indecipherable words, numbers and symbols in grid or geometric frameworks. Diehl has also been a prolific art critic, having contributed features and reviews to numerous periodicals, including Art in America, ARTnews, and Art + Auction, as well as to books and artist catalogues. In the 1990s, she became active in New York's performance poetry scene. Diehl lives in New York City and southwestern Massachusetts. She has two sons, Matt Diehl and Adam Diehl. Early career and life Born in Philadelphia and raised in Chicago, Diehl attended MacMurray College in Illinois for two years, after which she married a graduate student at Yale University (since divorced) and moved to New Haven, Connecticut. She returned to Chicago in the early 1970s and began painting among a group of artists, including Barbara Blades, Liz Langer, Sandra Perlow and Fern Shaffer, studying at the Evanston Art Center with artist Corey Postiglione. Diehl was soon active in the art scene that flourished in Chicago, exhibiting her work at galleries such as Richard Gray, Michael Wyman, Jan Cicero, and N.A.M.E. Gallery, and writing articles and reviews for the New Art Examiner, where she became Managing Editor. She had her first individual exhibition at Roy Boyd Gallery in 1980. During this time, her work was reviewed in the New Art Examiner, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Daily News. In 1976, Diehl moved to New York to work as assistant to John Coplans, then editor of Artforum magazine. Painting Diehl describes herself as a "painter who marries the literal with the abstract in a futile attempt to find balance between order and chaos." Art in America critic Cary Levine described her work as possessing "the intimacy of a personal journal at the same time that it is made impenetrable by her abstract style and refusal to provide the key to her encrypted symbolism." ARTnews critic Ingrid Periz wrote that the paintings' "disciplined surfaces make for lasting visual interest and … an almost meditative quality," in part due to Diehl's treatment of language as a formal device whose meaning cannot be decoded literally. In recent years, Diehl