Show Preview | Monique Carr - Southwest Art Magazine

Charleston, SC
Dare Gallery, September 4-30

Monique Carr, The Fog Has Lifted, oil, 20 x 20.

This story was featured in the September 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art September 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

WITH SUNNY summer days waning and autumn approaching, thoughts often turn wistfully toward idyllic days spent along the shore—perhaps now more than ever in these stressful times. That’s why Coastal Blues, Monique Carr’s exhibition of recent paintings, feels so tonic, with its more than two dozen atmospheric, expressionistic, richly textured images inspired by azure skies, sandy shores, windswept marshlands, and clouds backlit by the sun. The artist eagerly awaits the chance to talk about her work with visitors at the opening reception, which is held at Dare Gallery on Friday, September 4, from 5 to 8 p.m., coinciding with the Charleston Gallery Association’s First Friday Art Walk.

: Monique Carr, Untouchable, oil, 24 x 24.

: Monique Carr, At Bay, oil, 30 x 40.

: Monique Carr, Away We Go, oil/cold wax, 24 x 12.

“I call my paintings a fusion of experiences, emotions, and experiments,” says Carr. The experiences that inform her paintings include fine-art studies at the College du Vieux Montreal in her native Quebec, Canada, followed by 20 years of professional work as a graphic artist. Before marrying and making her home within view of the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains in eastern Tennessee, she lived for 10 years in the Cayman Islands, where “I fell in love with the ocean,” she says. That emotion frequently impels her to make the five-hour drive to the Atlantic coast in search of inspiration and then, whether painting on location or back in her home studio, “I often like to remind myself of the time I lived in paradise.”

Experiments, as well, play a vital role in the creation of the scenes she captures, often using a mixture of mediums on cradled panels or canvases. She often begins with a dark-toned underpainting in acrylics that helps underscore a contemplative mood. Sometimes, as in THE FOG HAS LIFTED, she’ll then apply a layer of crackle paste—a thick emulsion that, once its water base has evaporated overnight, resembles the intricate texture of beach sand that has been wetted by the tides and then dried by the sun. Over such backgrounds she finally applies her oil paints, sometimes mixed with cold wax, and then works the surface with an improvised assortment of tools: dough scrapers, combs, skewers, lengths of rope, bubble wrap, corrugated cardboard—“anything you can put your hands on.”

: Monique Carr, Cruising at Dusk, acrylic, 30 x 30.

: Monique Carr, Haute Mer, oil/cold wax, 24 x 24.

: Monique Carr, Marshland, oil, 36 x 36.

For works like UNTOUCHABLE, she’ll apply patterns using abstract stamps she makes from drywall tape, as well as splash on her paint with long-haired, tapered “pinstriping” brushes. “I always look for opportunities to use some fun texture,” she says. “When I splash and have fun, and go with what the work itself is telling me to do, it creates a lot of accidents that are a surprise for myself in the final results.”

Carr, however, never allows those surprises to come at the expense of creating good works of art. “As I progress on a painting, I make sure I’m paying attention that there’s a good balance of lines, shapes, colors, and negative spaces,” she says. “But I try to stop before I think I’m done, to avoid over-painting it, so I keep my work feeling fresh.” Such feelings are very much welcome right now, and Carr delights in providing them through her art. —Norman Kolpas

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