Garden Delights #1 Painting

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way--things I had no words for.” Georgia O'Keeffe  Painting is the way Carmen is best able to express the emotions she feels when focusing on nature and her environs.  In each work, regardless of the degree of abstraction, color, shape and line are essential elements used to convey the essence of what she observes and learns - resilience, possibility, rebirth. Her hope is that her paintings will be a catalyst for her viewers to stop, see and experience for themselves, the magic present even in the most ordinary objects. Over the past 25 years, she has exhibited and taught in the United States, Brazil, Europe and Asia.  With her emphasis on making her art widely accessible, she has chosen non-traditional exhibition venues such as private homes, clubs, and schools as well as galleries.  The logical next step to further this accessibility is moving her presence on line.  She has shown her work in places as diverse as Plum Blossoms Gallery in Hong Kong, Raffles in Singapore, Arte Contemporaneo in Sao Paulo, and The University Club in Chicago, as well as scores of private homes such as that of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Drexel Duke in East Hampton, Mr. and Mrs. Francois de Visscher in Greenwich, Connecticut, Mr. and Mrs. Chok Hung Lee in New York City. For the past two decades, she has been teaching as well as exhibiting.  She teaches on the faculty of the Silvermine Arts Center in New Canaan, Connecticut. The focus of her classes is on the personal visions of each individual  student.  Concentrating on creativity rather than technique, her program “The Big Brush Workshop™” is regularly offered in schools and organizations including Yale, the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Greenwich, and Steamboat Scholars in NYC.   She earned a Masters of Fine Art in Painting at Western Connecticut State University and is the recipient of numerous painting fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Arts.