Today’s paintings are by Carol Nelson, a Colorado artist who works in oils and acrylics. Carol’s subject matter ranges from still lifes to landscapes, and from animals to abstracts—and I must say she does very well in each genre.
This first painting, entitled Birthday Surprise, is one of her smaller still life oil paintings on a 6×6 inch panel.
Note that even though she’s working small, her roses are close to life-sized and cropped so that several of them exist almost as much outside the boundary of the painting as they do inside.
Naturally that makes for a much more engaging and interesting composition than if she’d let the dimensions of the panel influence the size and placement of her subject.
Moving on from the roses, I soon found that gold, yellow, and orange seemed to pop up quite often in Carol Nelson’s paintings.
Red Roof is probably titled just that in order to draw your attention to the buildings in the back, but personally I’m much more interested in the somewhat chaotic brushtrokes of red winding their way through the wheat.
Just look at all that amazing movement and color going on in the lower two-thirds of the painting: curving lines, thick paint, lots of different shades and tints of yellow, and even some flashes of green amidst it all.
It’s enough to make me wish it was all abstracted.
But maybe that’s just because I’ve seen what Carol can do with an entirely abstract work of art.
Fusion III is definitely my favorite painting by Carol Nelson. It has intense color, high contrast, and lots of thick texture, all working together to create visual depth and space within the piece.
Since it isn’t really a traditional painting, Carol explained on her website some of what went into it.
The non-traditional materials she used included “jute rug backing, copper, clear tar gel, wire. . .and metallic paints.”
Not a bad palette, eh?
And if you’ve been reading EmptyEasel for a while, you already know that I’m a fan of paintings with non-standard sizes like this one has.
The height of this painting adds a wonderful vertical flow and really capitalizes on the linear qualities of the wire and those long dark drips of paint.
There are a lot more paintings at Carol Nelson’s website, of course, so if you have a few moments I’d encourage you to head on over and take a look.
And, you can also check out Carol’s almost-daily art blog at www.carolnelsonfineart.blogspot.com