Fine Art Magazine – Fall 2009 – USA – PAGE 5

Fine Art Magazine – Fall 2009 – USA

Carson, page, 5,6,7

Charles Carson at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts — Gala ACADEMIA XXI — where he was honored as Artist of the Year “Charles Carson shows each and every unique feature of his great poetic skills, offering in his work a breath of life, his own life. Proof that Carson has worked his way toward artistic posterity came on the day that we started saying ‘It’s a Carson’ in the same way that we proclaim ‘It’s a Picasso, a Matisse,a Warhol,a Basquiat’or any other immortal artist.’’

—Christian Sorriano, Fine Art and Antiquities expert.
President of Drouot Cotation, Paris

This is “Carsonism…”

By VICTOR FORBES

Riding the bone-chilling north wind into New York City on his 2009 world tour, Charles
Carson motored down the New York State Thruway from his home in the province of Quebec, Canada, roaring in like a March lion with a truckload of paintings to display in the glass cathedral known as the Jacob Javits Convention Center. Here, for the past 20 years New York’s largest art fair has been a late winter tradition. All told, many thousands have introduced their work to the American art buying public at Artexpo. Few alive, however, can boast of an art movement christened with their surname, as in Carsonism—a fascinating pictorial language of painterly writing imbued with magnificent colors and patterns; an active meditation of original ideas.

The Spring Edition of Fine Art, featured Heroes of Creativity, Mr. Carson on the cover with a clever headline, “Carson to the ism.” Several Art historians around the world and museologist have deemed his style Carsonism,and his intricate and highly original works are as punctual and directed as the artist himself. These are strong paintings in two distinct yet related styles. The dimensional mosaic paintings with a build up of the paint and then glazed combine logically and intricately to give the appearance of a polished sea of possibility, glimmering mirror-like in a bath of pristine luminosity.

Charles Carson at Art Expo, New York 2009

Christian Sorriano, Fine Art and Antiquities expert from Paris and President of Drouot Cotation, “Art holds no more secrets or mysteries for a matured expert like myself. … Far from common trends and cheap visual effects, Charles Carson shows each and every unique feature of his great poetic skills, offering in his work a breath of life, his own life, therefore questioning and delighting the minds and the trained eyes of the connoisseurs who hang it on the walls of their daily lives.”

Over many years, said Fine Art publisher Jamie Ellin Forbes, “We’ve had the privilege of meeting so many artists. Some have risen to great acclaim and importance while others have fallen to the wayside. Each brings his or her own need to communicate their own dreamscape to the viewer and if you talk about this either in print or in person, you never know who you are going to be inspiring, what window you are going to open in their souls to communicate to the next level. The artist does this and such work is very important in all cultures. During this period of time, when people redefine values, they will find it much more so. Artists will become more important than they have been in the last ten or fifteen years outside of certain collectible concerns. Charles Carson’s paintings have a unique language. They are dreamscapes that invite you into the space, which makes you a part of the process of whatever the moment is that the artist is describing. It’s not a snap shot. You are invited into the imagination of the process and somewhere there’s been an instigation or an inspiration involving the colors, the mystique. The line is defined through the paintings with the application of the form married through the colors defining the lines. The painting itself—the composition—therefore becomes very free, very available for people to enter into.”

Fine Art Magazine – Fall 2009 – USA – PAGE 7

“Because the colors are incredibly clean, there’s a tempo. You can’t just paint and you can’t extra-polate unless you know form; you have to know form, you have to be able to paint in order to extrapolate. Carson applies the paint with a tempo and a sense of color as if the light were coming through. The pieces are very energetic, almost kinetic—and there’s a definite form lent through the application of the color. I don’t know what Mr. Carson has in his mentality as he paints, but it looks to me as if he’s painting the subconscious vision of what he sees; that he steps into the space between space, the dream space—and starts to paint the colors as they vibrate, as one form transitions from dream to reality and reality to dream and the abstract in-between. The colors are incredibly clean, which is rare—and they are built, have definition and are textural. You would think that it’s simple, but it is not. This is a very complex and difficult mode of expression to arrive at and you have to have an understanding of harmony and tempo to have a significant balance throughout the piece in order to create the composition. The result is the school of thought Carson is forming—Carsonism, Carson to the ism.” There are elements to this work that I have not seen elsewhere. I have not seen this technique done elsewhere. Have you?

“Isn’t this the founding of a thought process or a school? Did anybody do Braque or Leger, or Pollock before they did themselves?”

Fine Art Magazine – Spring 2009 – USA – Page couverture – Charles Carson – Heroes of creativity

Fine Art Magazine – Spring 2009 – USA

Charles Carson « Heroes of creativity »

CARSON TO THE ISM

By Jamie Ellin Forbes & Victor Bennett Forbes

Charles Carson has embraced his chosen mode of expression with the passion of a master, the nerve of an adventurer, and the intellect of a historian. Born in Montreal in 1957, he discovered his calling as he approached his teens. Frustrated at an early age with his own futile early attempts at originality, Carson went on a quest to find his vision — to Europe, Asia, the US and South America, living in his own dream fueled by the sea, forests and wildlife and by his lofty personal ideals. Carson was strong, is strong, but somewhere in Colombia, he found that even the strongest river cannot flow uphill. He became infatuated with the world’s fragile beauty; indignant in the face of man’s lack of conscience. It did not take him long to find out that the world was upside down, and when he discovered this, he sought to make it right. His brushstrokes on the canvas are akin to the soaring notes found in the best alto sax solos. May one dare say David Sanborn and John Coltrane in the same breath as Charles Carson?….history will decide that, but in his own time, M. Carson gives a vibrant tip of the hat to the incomparable mystery and uniqueness of life — all of which are reflected in his canvasses. A cool cat painting the world, he’s reached his cruising speed and hit a rhythm he calls “more than hectic. It’s a state of mind that propels me.”

Charles Carson, as the innovator of his new pictorial language as motif is credited as father and founder of the art movement entitled “Carsonism.” He is a nature lover and environmentalist who reflects and incorporates his ingenious view, as affirmed universal metaphor, in his personal lens of vision. The artist demonstrates Nature, as filtered through his imagination, deploying a creative extrapolation of evocative image. His works, being widely collected, attest to their appeal. Carson’s auction record at esteemed houses suggest that. He shares his passion on canvas to inspire others to see what he has found in expressing the creative beauty abundantly surrounding all.
In 1997, noted art expert, Caroline Bruens, founder of the Académie Internationale des Beaux-Arts du Québec, says it this way: “Carson takes his models and dips them in a bath of light, giving them back their original essence, allowing them to reach through this luminous, colorful, multidimensional fog-like atmosphere. In viewing Carson’s artistry, we find ourselves confronted by universal landscapes, with an open invitation to visit a new and unexpected galaxy of vibrant colors.”
Finding his passion for painting in 1970, Charles Carson began to work within traditional motifs, gaining inspiration from his environment. These first works were figurative. He found in the end, however, they were inhibited and unsatisfactory in stating his own artistic needs. On the journey to create his own approach, abstract and figurative gestures were combined. This technique, along with his unique depiction of pictorial image as written universal glyph, rapidly affirmed his creative vision as a talent distancing himself from other stylistically know motifs.

It would seem that Kandinsky’s words from his immortal little book, The Spiritual in Art, published in 1910 (“The boldness of color in a painting must attract the spectator forcefully and at the same time mask the deeper content.”) left a lasting impression on the young artist. The impact of his colors were developed in Colombia and other tropical vistas, far away from the winter of his youth — those endless nights where different shapes haunted his compositions, giving them a certain presence of dimensionality. In those cold days, he learned to focus on that hidden dynamic which so energizes his work. He paints in movement with a technique and energy appropriated from masterful predecessors. Some would cite Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, van Gogh. Those legendary figures have accomplished everything, but not even Picasso had an art movement named for him, yet we have Carsonism.

This term was coined by a noted critic who was quite impressed not only with the work, but with the sheer volume of intense paintings produced by the one young man. Lise Grondines, art historian and graduate of the Paris Académie française des sciences et des lettres, past president of the Salon International des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in 2002 told the artist “Carsonism places you among avant-garde leaders on the Canadian and international art scene and can be considered key in global abstract contemporary art. Your paintings are refreshing, strongly executed and demonstrate a rare expression.”
As an emerging artist, Carson participated in studio classes and attended seminars, ever-seeking to hone his sense of perfection to help him state a unique pictorial technique and artistic style reflective of his broad base of experience. His artistic pallate as a colorist incorporates both abstract and figurative vision in image allowing Carson’s interpretive landscapes, marine scenes and still life works to be infused with an affirming passion, within the structure of a composition. Thus originality of Carson’s artistic style was monogrammed “Carsonism” by critics.

Carson’s travels were the impetus for his deeply affected feelings regarding the social and ecological problems of today’s societies. Nature is now occupying a primary place in his creations, one of the major turning points in his work. His tropical scenes combine colors usually associated with a Caribbean sunset, yet he produces even greater depth and power than would seem conceivable from the paint. What technique manages to get such verve from color, and yet such detail? Again, it can only be described as “Carsonism.”
Influenced through his admiration of van Gogh, Cézanne and Turner, at thirty-three, Carson spent time in Latin America where the spirit of inspiration gleaned from Columbian and other landscapes led him to a new personal era of expression through his imagery. Carson made a name for himself in Colombia, where he held numerous exhibitions and an amicable relationship with Botero . While many native artists left for Europe and America in search of fame and fortune, Carson found international recognition emanated from his stay in South America. The influence the painters, topography and people of Colombia exerted upon the young Carson, and the vibrant and ancient culture that he absorbed, informs much of his work today.
Charles Carson concentrates on the essentials of structure, the purity of forms, and transparency employing color. The assured tempo of his approach and style allows him an in-depth focus. He combines his mind’s eye vision within observed landscapes or abstractions in compositions whose detailed color lends an aesthetic poetry to image. Depth of line is abstracted, by means of contrast between dark and light and or glyphic language motif alluding to collage or absolute abstraction of applied paint. The artist has gained a freedom of expression in his imagery through these various personal combinations, rooted in his classic rendering training.
Carson’s colors are seemingly the primary element of his work. The entire surface of his canvas is covered with generous portions of paint originating from a very pure and contrasting palette. Intense, original and luminous, they imbue Carson’s paintings with a distinct power as he continually defines new ways to imagine our world. “I see beyond the frontiers of art,” he often says. “I seek to explore a language which is different, fresh and eminently imaginative; that will offer a breath of fresh air to whoever will discover it.”
While brilliant gobs of oil paint fight for space on the artist’s palatte, and ultimately the canvas, on further examination, more discrete imagery is revealed. Forms and figures are esoterically rendered and well-preserved, showing themselves to an interested viewer after a few moments of concentration. The color doesn’t necessarily play with light, rather it creates the light. Then there is the very serious, less volatile portrait of an old man in bed and that one is all about the light. Which is the true Carson, or are they both merging?
In a mosaic technique work like Vibrations florales there is so much happening. How does one consolidate miniscule droplets of floral energy into such a complex solution of color? He is not revealing any secrets, any more than you would know if Pollock had a plan when he dripped all that paint, or if Vincent knew exactly where he was going when he produced the first star in Starry Night. No one can say for sure, but what Carson does share with the aforementioned artists is total devotion to painting. “Daily, faithful, obstinate, continuing to this day encompassing the discipline that art requires amidst the ups and downs of life.” He works, more often than not, in complete solitude.
One of the more stunning images is the Christ. In the artist’s case, it represents both the calmness the artist needs and a pictoral representation of spiritual and mystical fires continually rekindled which allow him to create such works as Parc Tayrona and The Crucifying of Christ. Is He rising or calling out in pain? His arms are outstretched, but there is no wooden cross. Is He emerging from fire, or is He rising to put out the fires in Hell? In this painting, Resurrection, He is victorious, as is Charles Carson, a very human artist accomplishing superhuman feats.
For further information and very interesting website, visit www.charlescarson.com