Featured Artist Carolyn Hutchings Edlund

New York-based oil painter Carolyn Hutchings Edlund invites you to explore the natural world through her richly colored and finely detailed landscapes. View more of her art by visiting her website.

 

 

I am an artist. I was given that label at a very early age, although it was many years before I assumed ownership of it.

 

 

What about me, my process and my work might you find of greatest interest? I overheard an art collector discussing his personal collection. He stated that he looks for art that emotes something within him, whether it’s the subject, the artist’s skill or a sense of joy or peace. Or perhaps because it is thought provoking and commands his attention. He said that his collection offers him pleasure with every gaze—that he “lives in the art.”

 

 

I, too, “live in the art.” I find creative stimulation in unlikely places, such as a city street bathed in glistening, late-day light following a rain shower. Such stimuli are the seeds from which ideas grow.

 

 

I am based in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley. I am excited by the natural world and its inhabitants. This excitement is expressed in my paintings.

 

 

I was eleven years old when I began formal painting instruction. My first instructor was New England artist Charles Gordon Harris. He emphasized painting the landscape plein air, so we ventured outdoors every Saturday from early April through October and set up our easels in woods or on a village sidewalk.

 

 

Harris taught me many things, but he especially sharpened my artist’s eye—my ability to see not just objects but color, shadow, lines, contrasts and harmonies, which is the key to being an artist.

 

 

With each year, that eye, my interior vision, has become more discerning and sophisticated. It is this artist’s eye that enhances the imagination, vision, recognition and awareness of the elements that make up the desired image, and drive the technical skill to create the art.

 

 

I produce paintings that are rich in color and emotive of my vision that entice a viewer to explore.

 

 

Recently, I produced two paintings of social commentary, Cold Turkey (withdrawal from an addiction) and All that Glitters (“. . . is not gold,” a wry statement against violence). A review of them states,

These are wonderful paintings…they are, unfortunately, very relevant social commentary. What intrigues me is the way the formal beauty of the works themselves—the composition, the color, the overall technical mastery of the paint—depicts two of the most terrible scourges of our time. This paradoxical approach enriched by the clever play on words, so much more subtle than the more obvious expressionist mode. . ., may cause viewers to do a double-take and thus prove to be very thought provoking in a more lingering way. – C. Pepper Cooper

 

 

The natural world compels me to explore it, delve deeper into it, and use the tools at my disposal to paint some frisson of my visceral connection to it. All of my work is a communication between me and you, inviting you to create your own narrative within the context of the art and to experience the art in a positive and satisfying way.

 

Artist Carolyn Hutchings Edlund invites you to follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

 

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