Denise Carletta

I grew up in the 60’s in New York. Like the city, my family was also large and loud. In our house at least two people were always talking or shouting over the city’s sirens and car horns. That’s probably why I gravitated toward painting; I could express myself without competition.

Visual storytelling is a longstanding tradition of the arts. For aeons, humans have used painting to share what they see and what it means for them to be alive in that moment. While studying abroad in Greece and Italy, imagery of the ancient artists inspired me to create legends and myths of my own.

My art is steeped in the tradition of contemporary figurative drawing, specifically portraiture. Using a combination of mediums, such as pencil, charcoal, paint and resin, layers naturally occur in my work. Through this stratum of mark-making, personas emerge in a captured moment. True stories, moral tales or something left unsaid, between all of the above my characters sway in an ambiguous world constructed of scraped paint, erased lines and smudged marks.

Layers of dark and light create who we are. Layers of dark and light create my work. The physical, external process of putting pencil to paper, brush to panel, portrays and mirrors my internal experience of life, a kind of geography of the soul. Like life, it is my hope that the viewer’s perception of my work shifts with each viewing, changes as they change, adding and subtracting from the story. Above all, it is this exchange, the interpretive process of sharing, I hold most high. Without it, there is no art, there is nothing to be said or heard.