Carrie-Ann Bracco
Carrie-Ann Bracco is a realist painter who has exhibited extensively in the Northeastern United States, especially in New York. Recent exhibitions in New York include showings at Culture Lab and Gallery 440 and notable solo exhibitions include venues such as DFN Projects and The Cliffs. Since 2004 she has participated in about 60 exhibitions to date and is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Carrie has participated in several residencies including in Norway at The Arctic Circle and Le Galleria Artists Retreat in Saint Lucia. Her work has also been published in artbooks such as Devotion by Daniel Maidman and The Figure by Skira Rizzoli Press.
The small to mid-sized paintings are typically executed with oil on panel and depict exotic, remote locations based on Carrie-Ann’s personal and residency travels while some of the paintings depict scenery closer to home in her native New York state. Based on her personal photography, the paintings depict destinations which are unfamiliar such as the wet rainforests of the Amazon, the chilling Arctic in the north of Norway, or the mountainous cliffs and shores of the Irish and Scottish Highlands.
Through these works, the viewer explores environments which instill a sense of detachment from familiar surroundings. The sheer darkness and gritty texture of the paintings tends to come off as photographic but with painterly and small, loose brush strokes. These open spaces tend to be minimal in depiction as the careful cropping may focus on a single subject such as a tree in the rainforest, a cliff by the oceanside, or an iceberg floating on the water. Carrie-Ann describes the specific scenery in her work as ‘mythic’ and ‘fragile’ as the paintings instill a sense of poetry and philosophical purpose to contemporary landscape art through hazy sfumato atmosphere and strategic use of negative space.
Tree Portrait, Two Trees (pictured above) portrays an intimate scene as if the viewer hikes through the thick bush of the Amazon forest, cutting a path with a machete and then blocked by the thick foliage surrounding a pair of trees. However, upon closer inspection, we will find the angle of the trees are seen from above as if the viewer were on a hilltop, rather than from eye-level perspective. The wet, smoky mist seeps from darkness in the foreground into a hazy gray cloud above. As spectators, we feel as if we are taking in the temperature and overall dew of the post-rain weather through the grayscale atmosphere mixed with naturalistic colors.
Carrie-Ann Bracco creates intimate landscapes which tend to portray a sense of isolated astonishment by her personal journey through remote, exotic locales. Her grainy and textural painterly surfaces, which may come off like analog photography, contains a documentary commentary with a personal touch of poetic refinement. The viewer takes upon themself a journey into alien, unknown territory as Carrie-Ann discovers these isolated sceneries out in the remote wilderness, only to be revealed through atmospheric, harmonic paintings with a clean, crisp but painterly surface. Carrie-Ann Bracco uses her own sense of inner-discovery as a muse to instill poetry and deep personal reflective purpose of identity into landscape painting.
