Carol Wax
Carol Wax works in several mediums including drawing, pastel, painting, and mezzotint engraving, the medium for which she’s best known. Working mainly from models, she combines observations with distorted perspectives, dramatic lighting effects, exaggeration, stylization and imagination to develop her compositions. Sometimes she stages elaborate dioramas, suggesting surreal narratives that consider the humor and menace inherent in our possessions and how they manifest our personal mythologies. In this way, she investigates psychological relationships with the material things we create, covet, consume, and cast away.
Says Wax of her work, “my imagery is inspired by commonplace objects that I perceive as sentient or mystical. I'm especially fascinated by vintage appliances or devices with organic forms that I exaggerate to evoke fantastic creatures or monuments. Or, in the same way seventeenth century Dutch still-lifes allegorically symbolized the impermanence of life and beauty, I may render outdated machinery as icons representing the transient nature of technology and consumer trends, contemplating how perceptions of objects evolve from state-of-the-art, to artifact, to art.” In addition to these artistic concerns, Wax has an annual tradition of making deer and snowflake themed holiday prints that inspired The Met to commission and publish a set of four prints …
Carol Wax works in several mediums including drawing, pastel, painting, and mezzotint engraving, the medium for which she’s best known. Working mainly from models, she combines observations with distorted perspectives, dramatic lighting effects, exaggeration, stylization and imagination to develop her compositions. Sometimes she stages elaborate dioramas, suggesting surreal narratives that consider the humor and menace inherent in our possessions and how they manifest our personal mythologies. In this way, she investigates psychological relationships with the material things we create, covet, consume, and cast away.
Says Wax of her work, “my imagery is inspired by commonplace objects that I perceive as sentient or mystical. I'm especially fascinated by vintage appliances or devices with organic forms that I exaggerate to evoke fantastic creatures or monuments. Or, in the same way seventeenth century Dutch still-lifes allegorically symbolized the impermanence of life and beauty, I may render outdated machinery as icons representing the transient nature of technology and consumer trends, contemplating how perceptions of objects evolve from state-of-the-art, to artifact, to art.” In addition to these artistic concerns, Wax has an annual tradition of making deer and snowflake themed holiday prints that inspired The Met to commission and publish a set of four prints in 2016.
Wax originally trained to be a classical musician at the Manhattan School of Music but fell in love with printmaking. Soon after she began engraving mezzotints, she was asked by the renowned print dealer Sylvan Cole to exhibit at Associated American Artists Gallery, launching her career as a professional artist/printmaker. With the publication of her book, The Mezzotint: History and Technique, published by Abrams, 1990 and 1996, Wax added author and teacher to her credits. In the ensuing years she has expanded her repertoire of mediums beyond printmaking into other works on paper and painting.
Recognition of Wax's work includes an Individual Support Grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Inc., two Artist Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Concordia Career Advancement Award from NYFA, The Louise Nevelson Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and residences at The MacDowell Colony and Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation's Space Program. A selection of the many collections that own her prints are The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York and Boston Public Libraries, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Library of Congress, and The National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Courtesy of the Artist
