Catherine Carilli – Abstract Painter

“Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me.  And as I have come to think of painting, it is my effort to create an equivalent with paint (that will) color the world and life as I see it.” – Georgia O’Keefe

 When I think of my twenty-year pursuit of painting, I often ponder this question. Painting is a very fulfilling creative pursuit, but it can also be frustrating and tedious.  Creating a painting is at times a personal challenge between color and canvas and the artist.  Some days in the studio are like taking “The Beatles’s Magical Mystery Tour Bus” into a delightful, provocative world full of color space and shape.  These playful canvases invoke the feeling that “color is running amok…” as a critic once said about one critic said about one of my favorite artists William Mallord Turner. 

Some successful studio days are peaceful and meditative, and these canvases reflect the Zen feeling of being perfectly in the moment.  Time lapses, and as the artist Henri Matisse has said “the comfort of color” enhances the world. In these abstract works, colors and layers combine together to move into their own dance and create a new visual world.  And on the days that painting is a battle, I think of the artist Gerhard Richter, who scrapes colors onto his canvas into muddy rainbows that invoke glimmering brightness. 

I also paint to explore the visual world; hence all of my artwork is not abstract.  Painting the human form intrigues me, as well as landscape.  My figures are often gestural, some with active lines and bright colors; with other figures I use sleepy lines and muted colors.  Landscapes also provide a direct visual representation of my world as I color it. Painting intimately connects me to self and the world.  Through sharing my artwork, the viewers then bring their own “eyes” to the work.  My work asks to be seen with the heart and analyzed with the mind.  I hope the viewer also finds emotional space within my work that they can intimately connect with.As we move into a more technological world, painting becomes an even more precious reflection of who we are and of our uniqueness.  It is a glimpse into our humanity and confirms the individual.  After all, humans have been making marks since the Stone Age, and we will continue to do so as we define ourselves into the 21^st Century. 

By Catherine Carilli 

“Why Paint?”  Invitational Painting Exhibition   October 2-November 2, 2008,  Front Range Community College, Westminster Campus.  3645 West 112th Avenue, Westminster CO, 80031 • 303-404-5000.  Opening Reception, October 2, 4-7 PM.

Acrylic and Glaze on Canvas, 2008

Purchased by a private collector

As a modernist, non-objective painter, I greatly admire and am indebted to the work of J. M. W. Turner “1775-1851”, an English artist during the era of Romantic, epic paintings. Turner is often viewed by art historians as a precursor to abstraction by his loose brush work, glowing layers of paint, and moody colors. He creates large scale paintings that reveal a sense of place seen through hazy layers of colors that forgo the precision of Classical Realism.

Turner studied Classical Art at the British Royal Academy in the early 19^th Century. He is one of the most esteemed artists of that era. He perfected the skill of large scale drawing and painting in the Classical style which focuses on historical and mythological themes. Turner also admired Renaissance and Venetian artists, such as Bellini and Titian. Turner saw in their work, a brilliant use of light and glowing layers of color that captured a luminous world and its many times of day. Turner pursued this use of light with bold and loose brushwork in his paintings. Some art critics during the 1800’s, when they first viewed Turner’s work, they called it “color run amok” as he continued to blend large scale landscapes and epic stories into glowing scumbled hazy vistas that hinted at story and place, the public and Academy loved his style. His paintings mixed romanticized nature with a new level of luminous beauty. His history paintings became diaphanous lays of color. His stories were veils of color and loose brush stroke to reveal dreamy poetic spaces. Turner was very influenced by the Romantic poets.

There is nothing like standing in front of huge Turner canvas. The colors embrace you like pure sunlight or shadow; figures and objects recede or emerge subtly. My painting Luminosity: “Homage to Turner,” is an acknowledgement to this fantastic artist whose style I dearly love. I work with underlining darker colors and landscape references. I layer glazes of lighter colors and shades of white to obscure the underlying structure. My intention in Luminosity: “Homage to Turner” is capture his glowing light and landscape feeling without an exact objective reference.

All subsequent Abstract artists are in debt to Turner, for his bold combining of the objective world and narrative on canvas with glorious veils of loosely painted atmosphere. Ultimately, Turner’s work is all about light.

As stated by his contemporary, artist and friend, Charles Lock Eastlake on Turner’s style:

The finest works of Turner,’ he wrote, ‘are a very intelligible introduction to one, and that not the least, of the excellencies of Venetian colouring. He depended quite as much on his scumblings with white as on his glazings, but the softness induced by both was counteracted by a substructure on the most abrupt and rugged kind. The subsequent scumbling, toned again in its turn, was the source of one of the many fascinations of this extraordinary painter, who gives us solid and crisp lights surrounded and beautifully contrasting with ethereal nothingness, or with the semitransparent depth of alabaster.

Posting By Catherine Carilli