There’s a good chance that most of the 160 people who came to the recent opening reception of the one-woman exhibit by Chestnut Hill artist Pragya Gupta at Awbury Arboretum’s Cope House in Germantown are not aware that she is a relative newcomer to the art world, having earned an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and then worked for an investment firm in London.

“My paintings come from personal experience,” Gupta told the Local, “from the feeling of living between two worlds. I immigrated to the United States from Northern India as an adult, and I’ve also moved from a career in finance into art. Both of those transitions involved leaving one identity behind while building another, and that in-between feeling is something I keep returning to.”

The exhibit of Gupta’s work, “The Places We Carry: A Search for Identity,” will be on display through April 28.

“My current solo show at Cope House comes directly from that place. … Before I paint, I try to slow down; I write by hand, practice yoga or walk in the Wissahickon. The actual work begins before I pick up a brush.”

A Chestnut Hill resident for the past six years, Gupta came to Philadelphia in 2012 to study business at Penn. The school she attended in India did not have an arts program, but when she was working for an investment firm in London, after earning the MBA from Penn, she happened to visit London’s National Gallery in 2015 because it was very close to her job.

“Something suddenly struck me,” Gupta recalled. “I felt a deep curiosity to know how some of the paintings were created. I started getting up early before work and reading books about creativity. I read ‘The Artist’s Way’ (by Julia Cameron) and started writing pages each morning. Writing gave me the space to feel what I was really feeling.”

Gupta is mostly self-taught, although she studied with Christopher Gallego at the Art Students League in New York for three years, developing a solid foundation in technique, and with Judy Glantzman, a prominent New York artist, who “taught me, among many other things, to follow my intuition in the studio without labeling it ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’” Gupta said. She also studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

The artist began painting seven years ago when she was pregnant with her daughter, Althea. She now has a local part-time “day job” as a business school admissions consultant, but as time goes by, she spends more and more of her time working in the studio.

“When I begin a work,” she said, “I rarely know what the painting will look like, but I do have clarity about the emotion or question driving it. The juxtaposition of mathematical elements — grids, circles — with intuitive mark-making using slightly awkward tools like palette knives and large brushes is my way of honoring and integrating both the structured and the creative without repressing either.”

What is Gupta’s favorite medium? “Oil painting. I love the texture and the feeling of oil paint, its versatility. It can be applied with a palette knife, and I love experimenting with different surfaces: raw linen, panel, wood.”

In the past three years, Gupta’s work has appeared in numerous group shows such as the Cerulean Arts Gallery in North Philadelphia; Bristol Art Museum in Rhode Island; Waterworks Art Museum in Miles City, Montana; Lloydminster Museum in Saskatchewan, Canada; Abington Art Center; Strathmore Mansion in North Bethesda, Maryland; and a solo show at the Manayunk-Roxborough Art Center.

Gupta’s daughter, Althea, is a chip off the old artistic block. At the age of 6, she loves to draw and build Legos.

Gupta’s husband, Michael Gallagher, who grew up in Fox Chase (They married in 2016 in India), has also had a dramatic career change. Formerly a lawyer with the Dilworth Paxson firm, he is now an English teacher at Kohelet Yeshiva, a Jewish high school in Merion.

He is also the author of “Oddfellows” and is in the process of releasing his first children’s book, “The Shire of the Wissahickon,” published by the Philadelphia-based Chalk & Wonder Press, which also published “Fabemol Hears the Heart” by Springside Chestnut Hill Academy teacher and Mt. Airy resident Mary Ann Domanska.

For more information, visit pragyaguptastudio.com. Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.