Kathline Carr

"Climbing the Fracture Zone", Abstract, Blue, White, Gray, Oil Painting, 2018

2018

Kathline Carr’s “Ley Line” is an abstract oil painting on canvas depicting a floating landscape, primarily in blues, grays and white layers of paint offset by strong blacks. Visible ...

Katherine Borkowski-Byrne’s “On the Cusp” is a colorful and painterly oil on canvas measuring 36 x 32 x 1.5 inches with thick and thin spontaneous brushwork in saturated red, blue, g...

Abstract oil painting in blues, white and gold. At a very young age I started studying and drawing maps. The first maps I ever saw may have been the highway maps stashed in our Ford Country Squire station wagon’s glove box. By my teens I had a map and atlas collection totaling well over a thousand and spent my free time engorged in cartography. My fascination with maps led me to study cartography at UC Santa Barbara and followed with creating maps for faculty at UCLA. Imagine the effect of spending much of a lifetime intimately tracing coasts, rivers, highways and more. Inevitably the visual rhythms of geography largely created my visual sensibility, that is, my sense of what works or does not work visually. I would dare say it has even seeped into my DNA. The interplay of a lifetime of maps and my fine art painting became most apparent in the late 1980’s when I started to create map paintings. Their purpose was not to explain the geography of a place but rather to use the essence of geographic forms to re-express them in an entirely new way. Today my paintings still echo their geographic foundation. Whether it is translating the essence of the sand patterns made by the waves on Baker Beach...

This painting with its luminous element reminds me of a rainy day by the sea. There is a gray from the lifting of the rain to the luminous sun breaking through it all.