"La Cueva" Painting

Elisa Carozza has been painting since her early teens. She studied with artists Diana Dowek, Alfredo Benavidez Bedoya, and Ann Balbirnie in their studios both in the United States and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Elisa also attended summer and weekend classes in Philadelphia at P.A.F.A.and Moore College of Art, before enrolling at Tyler School of Art, receiving her B.F.A. in 1998. In the Fall of 1999, a cross country journey took her to Northern California where she was impressed deeply by the wild beauty of the landscape and developed and exhibited several series of landscape paintings, including the Pond and Rooted series as well as local vineyard paintings. In 2006, after seven years in bucolic Sonoma County, she moved south to Oakland, in a swing back to city life, invigorated by the energy of flux and blossoming potential in the city. Carozza co-founded and operated a custom frame shop and art gallery in downtown Oakland for 13 years with ex-husband Travis Kuhl. While in the Bay Area, Elisa developed and exhibited the Threshold, Flights and Veiled series and curated exhibits in the gallery at Kuhl Frames. In late 2020, another relocation to Bend, Oregon spawned the "Mosaic Range" series of paintings inspired by the snowy mountain landscape and bright high desert light. In 2022 Carozza began another series, “Cuevas", featuring a hybrid of previous themes of natural elements but with a fiery palette and addition of new forms and symbols. Among life changes including divorce and stepping back from the gallery/frame shop, Elisa returned to the Philadelphia area in 2022-2023 where she continues to develop her "Cuevas" series, as well as the latest body of abstracts “Botanica”, a series inspired by flora and foliage, entanglements of wild gardens, underwater meadows, jungles and forests.