EDITH CARLSON

A native Minnesotan, Edith Carlson spent periods of time across the southwestern United States. One of her most productive artistic moments was in Taos, New Mexico, where Carlson developed what she defined as her “light paintings.” Carlson learned techniques through formal training with modernist painter Emil Bisstram, co-founder of the Transcendental Painting Group. Bisstram, alongside abstract painter Raymond Jonson, organized the group in the late 1930s, including both figurative and abstract modernist painters who lived in the Southwest and sought to expand the field of American painting. According to Bisstram and Jonson, the Transcendentalist group were artists who wanted to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual. 

A constant student of the ever-changing light of the vast southwestern sky, Carlson would carefully sketch light appearing at different moments of dawn, midday, and dusk. Using only pencil and paper, Carlson documented the faintest shifts in the sky through pencil shading, thereby capturing in her mind’s eye the light in its purest and most tangible form. Carlson then used a minimal palette of acrylic paint to translate this light onto canvas.