The magic of Carolyn Brady’s art is its richness. On the most basic level the paintings are visually stunning, beautifully crafted, and apprehensible. But even the uninitiated recognize that there is more than meets the eye here. The delight is in scrutiny, because even without the key to the specific symbolic content, the harmony, heightened aesthetic, and pitch of composition, color, and subject matter reveal underlying truths that do not fail to impact, even if only on the subconscious level.

Brady is the consummate still-life painter. Her preferred subjects are flowers. She works exclusively in watercolor, which she has not only mastered but commands; under her spell, this time-honored medium finds new vitality. In BradyÕs case, the term still life might be a misnomer; there is nothing still about her still-lifes. They feature prominent foregrounds and lush compositions in which favored objects tend to reappear, suggesting to the seasoned viewer a visual vocabulary of image and idea.

Though she inevitably returns to table still-lifes and chairs as her preferred images‚ Brady makes forays into the realm of landscape as well. The landscapes share with the still-lifes the priority given to the picture surface, revealing a sensitivity on the part of the artist to the power of the classical relief to lend monumentality and extraordinary harmony to subjects that are described across the surface of, rather than receding into‚ the picture plane.

In the litany of sources, the debt owed might in some cases be obvious – master still-life painters, Vuillard, MatisseÑin others, less obvious – Asian art and Eastern philosophic traditions.

Following in the footsteps of the finest still-life painters of the past, Brady’s work is not just artful presentation of the bounties of nature, or of finely crafted objects. It is grounded in a symbology that is at one and the same time personal and universal. Throughout time, flowers have been potent symbolic images, whether in the realm of religious iconographies or as poetic metaphors for fragile beauty, transience, love, and renewal in the life cycle.

After earning her MFA, Brady found work in the field of the applied arts in the textile design studio of Jack Prince, New York City. There she developed a feel for watercolor (it was the medium used to sketch preliminary designs). There she also met other noted artists of her generation. A logical progression toward a career as a studio artist followed. She concentrated on developing an understanding of watercolor as a medium and focused on making collages in the form of fabric wall hangings. These collages proved to be an important step in the development of the mature paintings. Certain tendencies are already obvious, particularly the play with figure/ground, and with sensuous line that defines boundaries. One of the hallmarks of Brady’s work is the preference given to prominent foreground; splayed tabletops featuring arrangements of flowers and favored household objects hold together more like puzzle pieces than restive elements in relaxed perspective. Fabric and pattern, too, loom large in the still-lifes – as tablecloths, as upholstery in her stunning chair paintings, and as wallpaper, offering rhetorical emphasis to the central issue of realities.

The other significant element in the development of her mature style is the camera. Brady has no problem with the label Photorealist; she is one in the most positive sense of the term. She composes with the camera, using a micro-lens to its best advantage to "sketch" her ideas. The lens allows her preferred insistence on foreground, on dramatic cropping, and on particular foreshortenings; it forces the issue of artificiality. Several photographs (printed in different values) might be consulted to study shifting tonalities until she finds her desired palette.

Part of the intention and appeal of Photorealism is the suggestion of the accidental, and Brady’s still-lifes may give the appearance of casual arrangements of daily household objects. But informing the choice of the objects is a strong philosophic undercurrent dependent upon the concept of Zen enlightenment in the menial, and Buddhist tantric principles that teach that all is interrelated, held together by connective threads interwoven like fabric. The still lifes vibrate with symbology. The square (harmony/ four points of the compass), the circle (infinity), the color (as emotional resonance as well as symbol), the vases, the porcelains, the Epton sculptures, the books, the postcards, and, above all, the flowers are metaphors for a living world.

The flowers, the color red, and the circle are time-honored emblems of the omnipresence of the mother goddess, and of fertility. Red is the color of birth. The Chinese bowls that find their way into the paintings are, as receptacles, analogous to the regenerating womb. The chairs are receptacles too; the child sits in the lap of the mother. Transience is figured not only in the different stages of budding and wilting of the flowers, but in the transparencies of the many glass surfaces and objects depicted, as well as in the transparencies of the watercolor medium itself. Glass is representative also of the dialectic of internal/external, and of light. Light is a key element in Brady's paintings. It underpins their shimmering illusionism, describing, and at the same time dissolving, form. This masterful control of light is BradyÕs signature as a watercolorist. She never uses white pigment; the illusion of the presence of light is given by her extraordinary control of pigmented washes.

Brady's imagery also functions on a more playful level. The chairs, for example, presume sitters; here Brady turns the tables on portraiture, vesting these elegant objects with a spectrum of diverse personalitiesÑnoble, gracious, congenial, warm. Jam jars evoke reverie; peaches sexuality.

A number of Brady still-lifes are housed in the Seavest Collection. Each treats a separate, favored topic of the artist. The earliest, Delphinium and Roses (1985), is a masterpiece of reflections, transparencies, and cool palette. The flowers in their cylindrical and spherical vases are in a crystalline middle world. The setting is Brady’s glassed-in porch, which features a glass table. It is a celebration of the dualities of inner and outer realms, of illusions and realities, of angulation and flow.

Red Tulips and Pink Carnations on Red Table (1986), which followed Amaryllis: Study in Red, painted in the same year, celebrates red. Apart from the symbolism attached to the color already noted, red stands for the summer, and in yogic concepts for the cosmic circle. It is the color of fire. In both paintings Brady wanted to overwhelm the eye with an intense saturated field of color. Here, the artist only tips her hat to color-field painting, for her imagery is deeply embedded in nature itself. The rectilinear order of Amaryllis gives way in Red Tulips to a compositional display of the generative circle, expressed in the dynamic, radiating bouquet on the splayed red table. The counter-device of the white porcelain vase with a blue floral motif only serves to reinforce the pitch and heat of the painting. Not only does Brady again play with levels of reality, in degrees of replication, but the role of fire is reversed. In the making of porcelain fire freezes – the clay is fixed by firing.

Letters from Home/Villa Les Oliviers 1994, Watercolor on paper 44 1/2 x 67 in.

Letters from Home/Villa les Oliviers (1994), painted eight years later, marks a return of sorts by Brady to her favorite subject of table still-lifes after forays into other areas that might fit more properly into the categories of landscape and genre interiors. Even within the realm of still life, she had been exploring other possibilities inspired by the dark, bohemian outdoor cafes of the cubist Paris of Picasso, Braque, et. al., where a different geometry and spirit ruled.

Letters is distinguished, as many of Brady’s still-lifes are, by a dense and artful composition. The traditional and ever-pleasing vase of flowers, here calla lilies and lilac, dominates. Beneath the spreading bouquet, desk organizers hold a variety of objects – postcards, photographs, letters, and a brochure from Brady’s solo gallery exhibition of the previous year. In this array there are references to work by other artists, to her dealer and friend Nancy Hoffman (encoded in the brochure and in a photograph – the little girl pictured holding balloons is NancyÕs daughter Rebecca), to her husband Bill Epton, to photography as contrasted to painting, to Renaissance maiolica, and to herself.

Brady rarely signs her paintings so prominently, and we should perhaps understand by this that Letters is a personal summa of sorts. Elegant pattern is a connective tissue for the painting. It links time, by virtue of the dating of the designs presented, and it links the varieties of replication of natural elements found in the painting from the "actual" flowers to floral patterns on the wallpaper and the paper covering of the desk organizers, and to the organic design of, and hand-painted and fired motifs on, the maiolica featured on one of the postcards. The painting within the painting – a still life of just a year earlier, Sunday after Lunch – reminds us of the luminous paintings that depend upon bright daylight and translucent glass. In Letters, instead, all is illuminated by the warm glow of artificial, incandescent light. The suggestion is a cozy evening indoors, and reverie. That light is a key player, and that Brady has intentionally shifted her palette from white to golden, is signaled by the candlestick with candle, hidden in part by the bouquet, that marks the middle of the painting and that is echoed in the faux candlesticks that form the base of the lamps. Reference to season – late autumn or winter – is suggested by the light and by the dead leaf fallen onto the drip plate of the candle. The promise of spring, of the open road, of new discoveries, and a reminder of the importance of landscape in the artistÕs Ïuvre lie nearby, in the toy car – a sculpture by her husband, Bill Epton – placed on the dresser top.

Life cycles, the internal mechanisms of the spirit, the interconnectedness of things – fundamental to the message of Brady’s art – appear and reappear in countless marvelous variations. As with nature and all great artifice one does not tire of the encounters.

For a more detailed printed view of the collection order the book:
	Get Real: Contemporary American Realism from the Seavest Collection Virginia Anne Bonito. Foreword by Michael Philip Mezzatesta, pp. 138, 68 colorplates, 2 b/w photographs Exhibition at DUMA April 4-July 6, 1997. Hard cover $40.00 Soft cover $25.00 To order contact: Duke University Museum of Art Click on Publications