If you like paintings that grab your eyes and won’t let go, consider JoAnne Carson’s recent work at Washburn: eight midsize paintings of single trees, each its own universe of botanical forms, electric color, visionary light, possible planets and pop culture references. If Charles Burchfield had worked for Walt Disney, he might have come up with these…
Whether creating and disrupting illusions or planting a garden to paint it indoors, she sets up formal problems to solve organically and vice versa. Honest yet elusive, nothing is what it seems.
...JoAnne Carson brings a kind of psychedelic intensity to highly colored paintings of trees, plants, and rainbow skies filled with strange shapes, spores, clouds, gusts, and rain. Almost electronic looking, they light up your eyes and wind up your mind.
- Jerry Saltz