BIOGRAPHY
One of the greatest pleasures for aficionados of contemporary art is the discovery of an artist whose work takes them into new territory without resorting to sensationalism and shock events. Carol Redmond is just such an artist. With her interest in textures, each work is a study in contrasts of color, with her unusual and pleasant combinations bringing to the viewer both the representational and the abstract. From the moment she got serious about art in high school; her career has taken an artistic trajectory, with a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s constantly been influenced by functional objects, such as embroidery and architecture in addition to art.Even her teaching involves combining art practice with archeology and history. “I look for simplicity of form most of all,” Redmond comments, even though the process to create simplicity might be complex. Each painting is a self contained series. At the beginning of each work she first determines the number and arrangement of panels. She builds the wooden frame then cuts, sands, and primes the panels, which she works on individually before arranging and installing them on the frame. This sectional work often combines several panels into diptychs, triptychs or grids. The imagery, created with oil paint, chalk pastel under varnish, bee’s wax, charcoal, torn paper, and found objects, is developed simultaneously by experimenting with various combinations of materials, colors, and textures. She seeks to find the right relationships between harmony and tension and reworks panels until she gets a composition that has the proper sense of vibrancy and balance. Redmond’s use of simple organic forms poeticize often unnoticed small fragments from nature, such as twigs, seedpods, stones, or cocoons. Redmond refrains from ascribing specific meanings to her art, “What I am trying to produce ideally is just enough imagery to start the imagination of the viewer, but to leave meaning totally open to interpretation. ”Indeed, she has succeeded in this endeavor as she has shown her work in nearly 40 exhibitions since 1987 throughout the United States and Canada and boasts inclusion in select private and corporate collections.