Bid for Small Works 23, an original framed oil painting on paper, from artist, Carrie B. Belk.

Artist Bio

It always begins with a grid. Whether embedding texture into gesso or introducing fabric to the encaustics, she extracts threads and breaks the matrix that she's set. What is born from this physically demanding process is striking artwork, distinct in its color, texture and light, and informed by modernist traditions of mid-twentieth century artists, a career in graphic design and a rearing in the creative world.

Carrie Belk grew up surrounded by exquisite design and encouraged to draw from a young age. "My parents were incredibly creative thinkers, and designers in fact of architecture, furniture and interiors. They were mentors and passed on their love of making," Belk recalls. Her parents owned an interior design and bespoke furniture business, which gained renown during the 50s, 60s and 70s. Everything in their color-filled home, from their custom-built furniture to the selection of fabrics to their lighting and flooring, was meticulously designed, usually by them. Twenty years in these surrounds inspired in Belk a fearless approach to color, texture, pattern and light.

After attending public schools in Queens, Belk graduated from New York's Cooper Union with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1981. She studied graphic design, drawing, painting, sculpture and calligraphy. After college, Belk worked as a graphic designer, winning numerous awards for her work.

Raised by parents that fled Nazi-occupied Germany for multicultural Queens, Belk's creative journey has taken her from glass mosaics to oils to the ancient Egyptian medium of encaustics. For her, materials are intrinsic to expression. Says Belk, "I love the sculptural, textured and ethereal quality of the wax in encaustics."

The emigré status of Belk's parents, has been a formative ingredient in her identity as a person and an artist. Belk's paintings expose a search for revealed epiphanies emerging from layered color, pattern and textures amassed and buttressed by textiles and threads woven in and pried out, building towards glimpses of polished and pure colors, essential truths carved from surrounds of ambiguity.