Carol Flaitz, New York
“Fissure VI”
ABOUT THE ARTIST
The work of Carol Flaitz is inspired by images of the microscopic infrastructure inside computers that runs 21st Century civilization. By distorting nano-technology to a billion times its original size and applying an explosion of color and texture, she presents the viewer with a metaphor for the role that contemporary technology plays in human society. Her desire is that the viewer will search and discover the pieces with the same awe that a researcher experiences every time he looks down the microscope to see things heretofore never seen before. Her ultimate desire is to take these images, composed of nothing more than chemistry and electricity, and breath life into them.
Her husband, Dr. Phil Flaitz, a senior engineer who works in material science and patent research with IBM, takes the photographs that inspire the pieces representing a new visual frontier. It is curious that microscopic images can be so beautiful, reminiscent of the finest landscapes, and indicative of the fine lines that separate nature, design, and technology. The nano-photography is abstracted into two-dimensional pencil designs on wood, and then submerged beneath layers of color, texture and glazes until a compelling landscape is born. Originally a ceramic artist, her goal is to combine the organic feel of ceramic glazing with two-dimensional painting techniques to distort the original, utilitarian nature of the photography into something beautiful and inspiring.
Carol’s artistic career began at the age of thirteen under the instruction of Katherine Nelson, a student of Hans Hoffman. She received an Associate degree in Applied Arts at the Fashion Institute of Technology, a Bachelors of Fine Arts at the College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, NY. and then went on to receiver her Masters in Fine Art from the University of Wales in Cardiff, Great Britain. Her work has been shown at galleries across the Hudson Valley Region, in New York City, and internationally in Germany, Sweden and Malta among others.