Carla Sloan-Brown
Carla Sloan-Brown is a printmaker, painter and psychotherapist living and working in rural Kansas.
Message
Carla Sloan-Brown is a visual artist and psychotherapist concerned primarily with authentic emotional expression through painting and printmaking. She received a BFA in Printmaking from Kansas State University in 2008. While at KSU, she was drawn to the process-oriented art of intaglio printmaking, specifically copper etchings. She was particularly interested in the magic that seemed to appear when plate met paper. Sloan-Brown received a full-ride graduate assistantship in the MFA painting and printmaking program at Miami University in Oxford, OH. Her work there played with scale and process while continuing the expressive line work displayed in her BFA show. She attended MU from 2009-2010; she left to pursue a degree in clinical psychology. Her work has been selected for a handful of juried shows at various points in her artistic career. Sloan-Brown lives and works in rural Kansas. Recent works have centered around the expression of the often intangible dissonance of living “with a blue heart in a very red place” while living through times of political upheaval and the targeting of marginalized communities.
Statement
I am a visual artist and psychotherapist based in rural Kansas. As a therapist, I walk with people to the edge of their understanding of themselves and their interactions with the world. Both my clinical and creative work are a process of curiosity and exploration of emotional experiences, boundaries, limitations, regulation, restraint, relationships.
My abstract pieces take the form of expressive, abstract paintings, etchings, and monotypes that act as a place of visual reprieve. Beginning with small scale etchings from many years ago, I began a life-long "line scavenger hunt." Constantly looking for lines, edges, contours, overlaps, limits. Evocative lines found in landscapes, figures, anatomy, architecture, nature. Line making becomes meditation when the brain (or soul) needs a break.
Current works in watercolor and oils seek to emulate the transparency and delicacy of previous color etching monotypes while exploring lines further in landscapes: line as design, line as form, line as figure, line as boundaries. Testing limitations of layers nurture my process-driven, inner printmaker, while technical “mistakes” (dilute paint, “cauliflowers,” bleeding, runs) are utilized with intention for the sake of interesting edges or textures.