Merry Karnowsky Gallery

The Merry Karnowsky Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition by Camille Rose Garcia. The artist’s newest series of paintings and drawings search for beauty and hope in an increasingly darkening world.  Her last exhibition in June 2007 was a comprehensive survey, “Camille Rose Garcia,” organized with Merry Karnowsky Gallery at the San Jose Museum of Art, and her previous gallery show at Merry Karnowsky Gallery was in 2006.

Escape to Darlingtonia, the new body of work from internationally recognized Los Angeles painter Camille Rose Garcia, explores our need to reacquaint ourselves with the magical and mysterious realm of the wilderness. Through a series of paintings and drawings, Garcia explores these unseen worlds.

She says of her work, “Fleeting moments of magic, like remembering something ancient, that’s what I am trying to capture in these paintings. What have we lost in our rush to tame and conquer the wilderness?”

Garcia’s palette is borrowed from the colors at dusk: deep lavenders, midnight blues, and inky blackberries, in an attempt to capture those fleeting moments in the sky before everything goes black. These colors are juxtaposed with bright magentas and yellows, borrowed from the colors in tiny wildflowers and fungi. In one painting, two campers roast marshmallows inside the giant head of an elk, taking refuge in the benevolent power of the forest. And the Lilliputian Darlingtonians, inhabitants of unseen worlds, appear before our eyes, but only when we are ready to see them.

Garcia received a Masters of Fine Arts from The University of California, Davis. Three books of her work have been published, her children’s book, The Magic Bottle, 2006, published by Fantagraphics Books, The Saddest Place on Earth, 2005, published by Last Gasp Publishing and Grand Central Press, and Tragic Kingdom, 2007, published by Last Gasp Press and The San Jose Museum of Art.

Garcia’s work has been featured in Flaunt Magazine, Nylon, Paper Magazine, Modern Painters, Ciudad Magazine, Art Prostitute, Juxtapoz Magazine and The Los Angeles Times. Her art has been exhibited in Spain, Germany, France, and Italy, as well as numerous cities in the United States. She currently lives in Northern California.