Where Art Meets Exploration: Carlyle Upson’s Creative Journey
Featured VentureMom – Carlyle Upson – Artist
When you’re an artist, you write an Artist Statement about what inspires you. I love that, and we should all do that. My long-time friend Carlyle Upson has been one of my favorite artists for a while. Her ethereal work inspires me. Here is her statement and some of her art. PS I love the questions that guide her, found at the end of her statement.
Carlyle Upson Artist Statement
Inspired by travels in over 35 countries, my artwork explores ideas of navigation through interaction with nature in global settings. Currently based in coastal Connecticut, I majored in Art History and Economics at Smith College and then earned a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University, which has led to my combined love of art making and immersive travel. I’ve always been drawn to activities that link the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
My artwork begins “en plein air” as a site study, then my ideas get developed in the studio as an iterative activity – painting the same subject again and again. A looping process serves to strip superfluity from the idea and distill it down to a simplified form. My semi-abstract style takes seemingly familiar subjects and reinterprets them in a contemporary fashion.
Fundamentally, I am an experiential painter. Breathing in the heat of Egyptian temples while sketching scarabs at Thebes and finding scarab beetles rolling their camel dung meal in the Sinai desert…these are the experiences that nourish creativity. Growing up in Illinois on the margins of corn and soybean fields so feeling the wind on the plains deeply affected me. You cannot actually see wind; you can only see how it blows through the grasses. Breathing in the heat of Egyptian temples while sketching the scarabs at Thebes and finding scarab beetles rolling their camel dung meal in the Sinai desert…these are the experiences that nourish my creativity.
Maps have always fascinated me – particularly the way a mathematical grid system is applied to the varied topography of the living earth in attempts to quantify and explain her undulations.
“Where am I? Where have I been? Where am I going?”
Artist website carlyleupsonarts.com
VentureMom Tip: Let your life experiences shape your work. Travel, family, and even the small details of daily life can become the spark that fuels your creativity and sets your business apart.
