Squeak Carnwath

“When people look at my work they should bring themselves. And they should pay attention to what their inner voice says and what intuitive leaps they have when they look at an image. What does it remind them of? There’s no right answer.”

Excavator of the Everyday

Squeak Carnwath builds her luminous, free-form paintings layer by layer, incorporating words, phrases, symbols and objects in lush fields of color. By decontextualizing what is familiar, Carnwath both maps her own consciousness and prompts the viewer to discover new associations with commonplace texts and objects. Her work evokes a philosophy of the everyday, where recognizable images become metaphors for thinking about bigger questions about who we are and what is real.

Squeak Carnwath has been incorporating words into her art for decades, and has recently begun expanding that motif into “song paintings,” where she continues her imaginative exploration of the mind by developing a dialog between visual language and sound. In her song paintings, Carnwath floats popular song titles on a color field of blocks that fit together seamlessly. Each song painting is accompanied by an iPod shuffle that holds a playlist curated by the artist, and viewers are invited both to observe the piece and to participate in its rhythm.

Ms. Carnwath completed a song painting during her month-long residency at Lux Art Institute, and recreated her studio environment so that visitors could observe her artistic process and daily work environment. Visitors encountered, among other things, “crazy papers,” or notes, quotes, paint colors and images that act as a diary of her work and sometimes become pieces of art themselves.

Squeak Carnwath received her MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in 1977. Her work is exhibited widely and is in the collections of major institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Brooklyn Museum. Ms. Carnwath has received numerous awards, among them the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Individual Artists from the Flintridge Foundation. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, and has a studio in Oakland, CA, where she has lived and worked since 1970.