* Brigitte Carnochan
American, b. Germany in 1941
Carnochan came to the United States in 1947, where she fell in love with ballet
and the idea of being a dancer.
Instead, however, she became a high school and later university teacher
and administrator with a love of gardens and gardening.
When her interest in photography, dating from the childhood gift
of a brownie Hawkeye, culminated in a decision
to make photography her career, flowers and dancers’ bodies
became her natural subjects.
Given the steady flow of evocative images from her studio,
the turn to photography was worth waiting for.
Carnochan's photographs are studies in form and contrast achieved
where the perceiving mind intersects the world perceived.
The painted black and white photographs of her flowers
and nudes contain the colors of nature re-imagined
through the mind's eye:
black and white photographs are an inanimate world that the artist then animates.
"Deciding when to paint an image is intuitive for me—
;some images lend themselves to the transformations of oil paint and others don’t.
I use all kinds of oil paints, not just “photo oils,” to create images—
and rely on my memory and imagination more than reality.
There’s a magic for me in applying the paints over the photographic image—
;moving them around, layering them, deepening the shadows
and opening the highlights until the image I saw in my mind’s eye
when I made the photograph is finally realized in the image on my desk.
Painting on photographs is an old tradition, and I like to think I put a modern spin on it."
