My Gift Painting

Sculptor, Painter, Installation, Multimedia Carson Case was born with a rare congenital heart condition, which significantly affects both her process and the changing forms of her work. Her interest was to develop organically, but with her long disciplined and dedicated approach as a dancer. Her early work was heavily focused on sculpture, although she had early classes in charcoal. Her subjects were often dancers, nudes, nature, horses and sailing ships. Carson spent a significant part of her youth in ballet and jazz rehearsals, and studied with luminaries in the dance world. This is expression is seen throughout her work. She always strove for stylistic and intellectual freedom, and found formal education limiting. She became ill during her second year at Miami of Ohio in 1990 where she was studying sculpture and architecture, exploring the work of Antoni Gaudi. She was forced to leave to regain her health, and transferred to The Herron (now Hope) School of Fine Art at Indiana University to study sculpture with Jean-Paul Darriau (Guggenheim Museum, the Joseph Hirshhorn Collection in Washington D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Denver Art Museum, Galleria Schneider in Rome, and the Smithsonian Institute.) Carson Case's early painting style was figurative and explored impressionism and surrealism, but after photographing dancers while experimenting with slow shutter speeds, she developed a rhythmic expression for her painting work. As a result, her painting work became more abstracted with hints of figurative elements. Her paintings now reflect her sculptural work, and a synthesis has begun. Carson moves to Los Angeles after traveling Europe for many months selling paintings as soon as their completed, and continues to develop her painting style, but is unsatisfied with 2-dimensional surfaces. Nudes in clay and metal sculptured dancers covered in fabric and plaster mâché are her preferred medium. During the years from 2000-2002, she begins having powerful and unexplainable experiences that expose sensitivities to visual and tactile stimuli, a sort of synesthesia. Again Carson is interrupted with health problems over 2 1/2 years of misdiagnosis with depression, only to have emergency open-heart surgery in 2003. This leaves her unable to sculpt for over a year, so she enters an international MBA program and focuses on Creativity Management in Copenhagen.