Carrie Beene

Carrie Beene
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

STATEMENT

I’ve always been amused by what draws my eye. As a young teen I sought out dark and storied jazz clubs instead of pink and pretty. I prowled the underground and abandoned instead of the shiny. Smoke from the dead and the dirty Ganges drew me. I’m drawn to stacked and rambling architecture, askew and bowed, with rust and bright peeling paint dripping from facades. Dignified poverty and the secret magic living there. These things make my eyes feel excited and satisfied.

The world and its struggle, its life and its death, its color and its contrast, sadness splashed with interludes of hope…always moving to its sparkling rhythm.

I want my work to look like that to me. Like it was always there, and I came upon it accidentally. Not a soft world but textured like an old place, well-traveled and still moving. As I make a new shape or find a new color or a new mixture of media and apply it to the canvas, I want to feel that excitement of coming around a corner and seeing something that catches me, maybe with a shock of giddiness or a sureness of connection, but always with that little bit of thrill.

BIO

Carrie Beene began at the Kansas City Art Institute at age 17, where she studied painting under internationally esteemed artists Lester Goldman and Wilbur Niewald. Moving to New York City, Carrie spent several years immersed in her artwork, exploring the mood of 1980s New York. Carrie’s art was included in multiple shows in new and emerging East Village galleries.

In 1989, Carrie moved to Haiti, remaining there developing a new vision of rhythm and color over a period of 12 years. She returned to New York in 2003 and created a digital art presence in addition to continuing with analogue artwork in her old East Village neighborhood. Today, Carrie’s work is the culmination of her experiences with the world around her and her obsessive experimentation mixing materials.

Paper has become an important element allowing the media to enter into or be layered with each other to create the textural interlacing of oil, water, powder and ink, graphite and charcoal and more. Carrie also has an extensive background as a digital artist and Photoshop expert and is the owner of the New York City-based retouching company, Carrie NYC, Inc, in business for over 10 years. She is the author of Real Retouching: A Professional Step-by-Step Guide, available on Amazon. Carrie is a professor in the MPS Digital Photography Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Carrie lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana.

ARTIST CONTACT

(212) 203-1450
[click to email]
carriebeene.photoshelter.com

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