Untitled Paradise: Carolyn Carr

October 22, 2002, Hong Kong--Carolyn Carr is not only an established painter collected by museums and a fashion designer featured in Vogue she is also the Great Great Granddaughter of Julian Carr, whose portrait is in any edition of the book The Soong Dynasty. “Granddaddy raised Charlie Soong,” she says for which Carolyn’s Father and Grandfather are named, thus making this showing for her in Hong Kong extra special as it will be the first time she will trace her family’s steps in China.

In Carolyn Carr's latest collection of works "Carolyn Carr, Untitled Paradise", her paintings continue to delight viewers by blending the landscape of cultures from the West and Far East. This historically significant relationship of both cultures has undoubtedly been profound. However, Carr's specific interest is the artistic interdependence of the cultures, metaphorically and obviously. It has been noted that the Southern parts of the United Sates, of where Carr was born, has been so influenced by the decorative arts of the Far East that Eastern elements have been permanently infused into the cultural language of the South. In her new pictures, Carr uses visual elements representing this cultural phenomenon to paint a view into the quiet and private lives of women reposed in a garden paradise.

Carr's female figures embedded and layered in a luscious natural environment, borderlines the fantastical. Though surprisingly, these pictures are rendered by the simple use of shapes and color. It is Carr's graphically charged painting style and the use of strong but peaceful colors, which captures the moments best. It is this contradiction of the bold fauna and the traditionally clad women that gives the work energy. A woman is seen resting in a boat under the shade of an umbrella, lounging in a chair amongst great leaves, and sitting quietly inside a garden wall, to describe just few of the eighteen pictures in the collection. Further enhancing the painting environment, exquisitely rendered moths and butterflies flutter about freely - almost dangerously- with mysterious presence. Through these pictures, the audience is given the rare chance to be included in a private intimate moment set in a fantastic landscape radiating youth, glamour, danger, and mystery.

Katie de Tilly of 10 Chancery Lane Gallery states, “when I first saw Carolyn’s paintings I was immediately taken by the way they expressed a certain Asian charm. Lazy days on a veranda while a hot summer rain falls type of feeling. At the time I had no idea that she or her family had anything to do with China but it all fits together.”

Carolyn Carr lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.