CAROL PRUSA
artwork | audio | statement | 2008 update
artwork
see more work (Babel)
audio 
(see Making Art in Iowa and Art & Spirituality)
artist statement
Connection is fleeting. A pregnant belly distends towards a potential big bang. Macro and micro scales collide in intimate exchanges. The chaotic abyss rebounds. There are no answers but you feel infinitely generous.
As a "conceptual voyager" I intuit visual solutions to problems contemplated by cosmologists. My intimate painted surfaces are initiated in silverpoint then heightened with acrylic. Metal leaf and fiber optics are added. As I visually play with the frothy flux created when scientists and artists imagine, each work posits, as George Johnson suggests science does, "... a glorious human construction, an artful fitting of the data into a carefully crafted mental framework, a construction of towers that just possibly might have been built another way." As artists and scientists seek to explain our place, I join these dreamers of the "whole" and offer possibility.
"...Prusa's horrors are all sublime, tinged with melancholy and charged with an extreme attention to detail that makes them seem, somehow, to probe the heart of life’s mysteries and illuminate the essential fact of life: that it is abundant, simple, unpredictable and very beautiful...." — Laura Stewart, Fine Arts Writer, The News-Journal, Sept. 3, 2006
2008 Update
How has your life changed in the years since I interviewed you?
I have lived in Florida close to a decade and am enjoying it. My children are now both in college and I spend most of my time outside of teaching in my studio making my work or down in Miami looking at art. My family tries to lower its carbon foot print by being vegetarian, driving a Prius and we have an electricity generating solar system on our roof.
What kind of artwork are you doing now?
My current work is silverpoint and graphite drawings done on curved surfaces and employ fiber optics.
How has your artwork changed in the last ten years?
My work has changed a lot. It is much better! (Although everything I did prior supports what I do now.) My current work is primarily subtle shades of grey and intuitively driven, although still references historic symbols. Ten years ago my work was colorful — also earlier work employed aspects of installation, performance and video and was more conceptually driven.
What motivates you to continue making art?
I make what I want/need to see. I constantly am challenged by it and wake each day to learn and think new things through it. I cannot imagine not making my work. When not teaching I work in my studio 80 plus hours a week — and thoroughly love it.