The Fine Art Auction Presents: The Captivating Realism of Carrie Graber

Carrie Graber: California Modern Realism:

Contemporary Contrast Light Perspective

The Fine Art Auction consistently brings to its audiences startingly talented Artists and magnificent Artwork. We are thrilled to announce the Fine Art Auction’s premiere of the works of California Modernist Carrie Graber. Graber’s artwork transcends the canvas, becoming an experience, a moment frozen in time, and a window into the authentic allure of contemporary California.

Through the radiant allure of Carrie Graber’s artwork, every brushstroke encapsulates the essence of the fashionable and sophisticated existence in California. Carrie’s artistic creations exemplify the captivating nature of modern realism, a movement that intriguingly blurs the line between photography and art.

Graber’s, well known and highly regarded as “An important Artist exploring the California lifestyle from her unique point of view” is renowned for her scrupulous focus on detail, which she well executes to infuse an incredible vitality into her subjects. One has such a visceral reaction to the works: you feel as though you are in the works and experiencing the sunlight, the landscape. Truly remarkable.

Whether depicting the crisp reflection on a polished surface or the warm radiance of a California sunset, her paintings are an ode to light and shadow. Her skill in authentically depicting the refined ambiance of her subjects is unparalleled.

Coming out of Southern California, Carrie Graber is considered among the most talented, exciting, and well-collected artists in the market today. With her warm tones and exquisite control of illumination creating a perfect composition of light and contrast, Carrie captures the beauty and subtlety of familiar environments, which are often overlooked. Her soft, realistic but also bold approach warms the viewer’s’ senses and creates a feeling of intimacy. This is the link between Carrie and one of her primary artistic influences, Dutch master painter Vermeer.

An ode to the quintessential Californian way of life, Graber’s canvases depict everything from the lively ambiance of a coastal carnival to the serene sophistication of a mid-century modern residence. Through the mesmerizing allure of her creations, spectators are enticed to enter a realm where each day is an opulent retreat.

Only upon closer inspection can one discern the delicate brushstrokes that comprise Graber’s work’s breathtaking clarity. This intricate interplay between overall impact and minute details is what causes her paintings to remain in the viewer’s mind long after the eye has averted away.

About the Artist

Carrie had the pleasure of growing up in Southern California, hot summers and warm glowing colors forever romanticized their way into her work. She is a master genre painter of the Southern California contemporary school, whose depictions of light place her in the line of the Luminists. Graber is also in the line of The Hudson River School – 19th-century and early 20th-century painters from the Northeast and Midwest, whose paintings are grounded in capturing the light effects of the sun and nature in dramatic landscapes.

Though this movement specialized in anything but genre pictures, Graber mixes this 19th-century fascination with light with her own Pop iconography in the tradition of post-Modern hybridizing. Indeed, the light of SoCal is so different than that of other regions, Graber does a service to the Luminist and Hudson River traditions, with her golden-white light of the skies there, executed so faithfully and fluidly. To top it off, her renditions of the world-famous Southern California lifestyle, as Pop art, are gemlike, sexy, and exacting.

She graduated with distinction, in the fall of 1997 from Art Center College of Design where she studied with such luminaries as Burne Hogarth, Harry Carmean and Richard Bunkall. Shortly thereafter, she took a position as an artist apprentice with the famous Romantic Impressionist Aldo Luongo. A short year later, Aldo sponsored her to develop a body of her own work. Carrie’s first opening was in coastal Cambria, California in 1999, and a success. For the next decade, Carrie traveled the world, showing exquisitely developed oil paintings and charcoal drawings. Her admiration for figure and form, juxtaposed with observations of light and shadow and steeped in a fascination with composition materialized in hundreds of paintings.

“I think that it’s important for me to realize that things are coming together – skill, observation, and consideration. As an artist, I pursue what will give me the greatest satisfaction and joy, a communication filled with discovery and triumph. What is in a medium? What is in a subject matter, or style? I am currently studying the concept of beauty, and why we find something so. What is preconceived, and what can be edited? I always knew, and now fully realize that function always takes a form, not as a conquest but as a lover. I appreciate the opportunity to exhibit this intimate process itself as art.”

–Carrie Graber–