Carol Brown Goldberg: Tangled Nature

Carol Brown Goldberg has long been interested in exploring the relationship between art, science and nature. Through the use of wildly expressive lines, saturated colors and repetition, she explores a wide range of themes such as the nature of symbiotic relationships, the evolution of memory, and the contrast between chaos and order.

Goldberg’s artistic process is at once both controlled and free. Taking her cues from automatic drawing developed by the Surrealists, Goldberg’s hand meanders across the canvas. In applying chance and accident to her mark-making process, she allows the unconscious mind to hold great sway. Hence the works she produces may be attributed, in part, to the subconscious and thus reveal something of the psyche, which would otherwise be repressed.

Tangled Nature refers to the artist’s approach to the complexity inherenet in human relationships as well as the visual appearance of the natural world. Over the course of her career, Goldberg has returned again and again to automatic drawing, this time to produce a series of paintings and drawings that create, what seem like, mysterious complex biological landscapes. These organic, almost extraterrestrial, worlds comprise shapes likened to plants, flowers and microscopic organisms that intertwine together to form strange towering jungles that surround the viewer in an unexplored reality.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.