Article Analysis: “Deceptively Playful Portraits Mask Personal Traumas”

This is a review of an article written by Sara Farell Okamura from Hyperallergic about the artist, Susan Carr.

Susan Carr had 75 paintings and sculptures featured in her solo exhibition FLIPSIDE, displayed at LABSpace in Hillside, New York this past May. Okamura remarks that the paintings seem “whimsical” and “carnivalesque” at first glance; the use of bright, bold colors and the childish style Carr paints her portaits in create this effect. However, the paintings begin to look more and more unsettling as they are more closely observed, revealing the artist’s underlying traumas. Her painting “Ear Plugs” seems like a child’s portrait with the bright colors and extremely thick texture – it is almost as if she had squeezed the paint from her tube directly onto the wood. The stark contrast between the equally intense colors is both eye-catching and unnerving, and the use of the 3D texture of the paint heightens the unnerving feeling, transforming the childish portrait into a maniacal and almost graphic depiction of a child that pops out to me. In many of her works, she uses these techniques to convey her intense feelings and traumas.

I noticed that in several of these works, the background is almost as loud as the main focus of the work, despite only being a single, constant color. The red in multiple paintings makes the subject of her works stand out in contrast and also creates a feeling of unsteadiness. In one of her paintings seen in the display above, she paints two figures hugging each other, heads tilted down under a deep blue sky with a black moon hanging over them. It invokes a feeling of sorrow and grief that the artist may be feeling. The article reveals that after Carr became a single mother at the age of 16, she dealt with decades of financial struggle and lost one of her sons, after which she began drawing a white figure with an eye for a head like in her painting. She later created a second figure, which is seen in paintings like the previously mentioned one and in her painting “A Song, A Dream,” as if trying to give her late son a friend so that he would not be lonely. Carr also explains in an interview that gesture, a term I am unfamiliar with, is a very essential part of both her work and humanity as a whole. After some research I found that it was a term used to describe the emotion felt in brushstrokes, something that can evidently be seen in her works.