Carson Legree

Shield, silk, ink, oil, acrylic on panel, 42" x42", 2021

Events in the last several years have been shocking, frightening, and bewildering. My experience of these events has been almost entirely from the internet as I quarantined alone. The world as encountered through digital media is weirdly both separate and intimate. It comes into my home. I view it from my bed in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. It haunts me.
In my paintings I seek to interpret the emotion, and the spiritual energy of events I see on my electronic portals. My work might be described as pulled from the headlines. I start each work with photo or photos from an online source. But my work is not expressionistic. It does not capture or attempt to capture the immediate horror of events. Instead, my work seeks to digest the animating principles of these furies and to comprehend something essential about the people I depict. The result is a meditation, a distillation or, perhaps, a transmutation. The process can be almost trance like.