Rachel Carbonell

I have been doing art for as long as I can remember. In my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, I was enrolled in Saturday art classes, in my younger years at the Carnegie Museum of Art and in high school at Carnegie Mellon University. Although I took few visual arts classes in my undergraduate studies at Oberlin College, I continued to passionately make art and had the opportunity to receive further formal training during a luminous summer semester in Florence. My art represents this convergence of extended, internalized formal training and intense personal creativity and spontaneity.

I see m...

I have been doing art for as long as I can remember. In my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, I was enrolled in Saturday art classes, in my younger years at the Carnegie Museum of Art and in high school at Carnegie Mellon University. Although I took few visual arts classes in my undergraduate studies at Oberlin College, I continued to passionately make art and had the opportunity to receive further formal training during a luminous summer semester in Florence. My art represents this convergence of extended, internalized formal training and intense personal creativity and spontaneity.

I see my art as a necessary outlet for my creative and intellectual energies; as such, my oil pastels and collages tend to be very primal, emotional works. Although my work tends toward the abstract, I generally focus on the interaction of organic experience and emotions with commodified, mechanized culture. I am interested in developing organic patterns and layering these with dramatic color and unexpected images to create a strong emotional and aesthetic effect.