Deb McCarroll

Deb McCarroll is an emerging artist living and working in Seattle, WA. She’s an award-winning painter and writer, having been featured in the arts magazine Stone Voices Arts Quarterly and winning ‘Best Painting’ in the Still Point Gallery Abstracts juried competition. And her painting For Sale was awarded the cover for the Still Point Arts Quarterly Four Freedoms Project. Her book, The Long, Hot Walk was short-listed for the prestigious Nancy Pearl award and won a North Street Book Prize. McCarroll has exhibited nationally and her work is featured in numerous private collections.

Trained in graphic design, McCarroll’s work deliberately resides in the space between figurative and abstract. Her acrylic paintings feature selectively oxidized metal leafs over textured color, resulting in pictures full of movement and light. The work explores themes of nature, dreaming and memory.

“I’m always juggling lots of different things in my work, but my real interest is the process of painting itself. I say process because my way of working isn’t just about paint. I try to inform a real sense of layered and emotional conversation in my work. I like to use materials that show age and history. I strive to bring the same kind of earthy complexity that the great potters achieve in their work. The chemical changes and natural imperfections produced in a fiery kiln I’m trying to replicate in a cold, one dimensional process. I incorporate metal leafs that oxidize and tarnish in unpredictable ways under selectively applied acid, and I love that. I love ‘painting’ with that chemistry. It’s an controlled chaos. Additionally, I rub in dry pigments, I scratch and sand and generally do all I can to give the work depth and emotion. It’s labor intensive but the result is often light and spontaneous.

Behind it all though is a love for materials, natural processes and arrangement. Making a painting is such an exciting thing to do. I hope that comes across in the work.”