Robbins-Karan, Cara

Cara is an oil painting artist currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting.  She lives in Texas and, along with painting, teaches private and group art lessons.

She is inspired by nature, uncultivated and untouched by humans, which her paintings celebrate in a gestural, loose style, full of color complexity. An important element of her work is an emphasis on light and shadow depicted through a wide range of values and temperatures. She uses a variety of textures from refined and detailed brush strokes to thick, chunky impasto. Her body of work includes both representational and nonobjective abstract paintings.  She is currently exploring desaturated color palettes and large areas of negative space.

In her representational work she paints environments in which light is emphasized. Recently, her landscape work has been inspired by golden hour, dusk, and storms. Within these compositions she often depicts expansive spaces with deep, atmospheric perspective.

Her abstract work focuses on texture exploration.  She utilizes a variety of mark making that creates different sections of textural experience within the composition.  These paintings develop through a process of intuitive problem solving that consists of a constant modification of balance, movement, surface, and value.