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Carol Dawson: Intimate Jungles

Presented by Wally Workman Gallery at Wally Workman Gallery

March 5-March 26, 2011

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The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ drives my green age...
- Dylan Thomas

In her new series Intimate Jungles, Dawson emphasizes saturated color and density to create lush worlds that envelop the viewer. Originally inspired by Albrecht Durer's iconic 1503 watercolor The Great Piece of Turf, Dawson has also drawn on the traditions of Japanese Kacho-e, European botanical and fairy-tale illustration, and poetic and prose narrative, in order to craft environments that seem to defy their own two-dimensional plane and become a part of the viewers' immediate surroundings.

The shift from smaller, more constructed studio imagery to the greater scale and strict plein-air placements of these works is one toward which Dawson has been evolving for more than two decades. The Chinese concept of chi, or life force, has always propelled her vision of the natural world and her desire to capture its connections and energies within the limits of the visual plane. However, it is the recent development of employing the larger format that has enabled Dawson to surround and potentially engulf the viewer in her intimate environments.

A professional writer and teacher as well as a watercolorist, Dawson is interested in the ways the two arts inflect one another. Using words as tools with which to evoke a world requires an imaginative effort similar to the making of a graphic image. But because picture-making involves a separate, non-verbal part of the brain, Dawson has found that each discipline not only completes a rich expression of its own, but also exerts a subtle influence on the other. Thus, the alternation of both practices generates a synergy that satisfies the deepest spiritual impulse toward narrative expression.

After studying English Literature and Anthropology at The University of Texas in Austin, Dawson went on to launch her writing career, live abroad in Europe and New Zealand, and formally train under the tutelage of painters Ray Vinella and John Koenig in Taos, New Mexico. She is the author of four critically acclaimed novels and an award-winning non-fiction book. In addition, she has published numerous articles in national magazines, while simultaneously exhibiting her watercolors in galleries and shows in New Mexico, Washington, and Texas. She has also served as the official Writer-in-Residence and Visiting Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at The College of Santa Fe, and continues to instruct writing workshops and classes. Her visual work is represented in public and private collections across the country.