Carla Kurt's artistic journey began when she was a child, spending countless hours drawing, painting, reading, writing stories, scavenging trash for treasures, and decorating her space with found objects—all with the idea of creating a world where imagination becomes reality. Today, she continues to follow her muse with a synergistic combination of passion and sensibility that informs her unique style of visual art.
Described as magical, ethereal and dream-like, Kurt's paintings combine layered imagery, texture and evocative color to explore the visual poetry that occurs when mood and moment meet. With a nod to Symbolist, Expressionist and Surrealist painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kurt's imagery is drawn from her own personal mythology, cultural archetypes and symbols, poetry and nature.
Kurt took her first painting class when she was ten, beginning a formal study of art that continued through college. She continues to study painting, both formally and informally, working with a diverse group of contemporary painters and mixed media artists. Kurt currently shows her work in local New England galleries, and her paintings are in private collections in both the United States and Canada. |
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Statement
As an artist, my truest joy comes from giving visual shape to the images in my mind and the emotions in my heart. I work primarily as a mixed media painter, combining acrylics with paper, ink and other media. I use these various materials to create textured layers that evoke a sense of history and mystery at the same time, my visual interpretation of the personal growth ring layers that we sometimes hide and sometimes reveal to others. I work on both canvas and wood, building a story for my vision with each layer, using a variety of distressing techniques as I go — sanding, scratching, scrubbing and so on - to create textural interest and provide glimpses of the work's history.
Marcel Proust, the quintessential dreamer, wrote, “If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.” My inspiration comes from nature, music, poetry and literature, and my dreams. Many of my paintings are conceived while walking outdoors, listening to a song or reading a poem, drawing upon my own personal symbolic mythology for interpretive imagery. It’s often the mood that an experience or words create that inspires my work, so my paintings aren’t literally narrative, but rather evocative and open to the viewer’s own story.