Carla Poindexter

Bio

Poindexter is an active studio artist with 30+ year's professional experience in painting, drawing, printmaking and still-life photography. Additional experience includes Carnival Daring-Do “Featuring the Floating Apparitions” - a 9-minute 2D animated film made from the characters and background spaces within her paintings and drawings. The short film was selected for over twenty film and video festivals and gallery venues, nationally and internationally.

Poindexter’s other interests in book arts culminated in a series of delicate analog photography of miniature constructed still lives, and another series of hand-colored drawings and etchings, all of which combined characters from life and the imagination into a professionally handbound edition of her 40-page artist’ book, “The Devil at the Door”.

In 2003 Poindexter created an 8' x 28' large painting on canvas on seven connected panels titled, “Infinite Possibilities”. It is a public painting funded by a Florida Art-In-State Buildings competitive grant and is on permanent display in the front atrium of the Darden Theatre Building at the Rosen College of Hospitality Management on Universal Blvd in Orlando, Florida.

Prior to moving to Orlando in August 2000, her professional career spanned 20 years in Houston, Texas, where together with her artist husband, Robert Poindexter, they contributed to building a large and lively community of artists. They shared studio spaces with other artists and numerous group exhibitions throughout the years. Carla Poindexter was represented by three major Houston galleries and an excellent gallery for several years in Sarasota, Florida (prior to the death of the owner Allyn Gallup). Poindexter has a record of 21 solo exhibitions and numerous group shows. Other professional experience includes four very active and collaborative years as Houston Metropolitan Magazine’s Art Director – which in large part prepared her for the other half of her current life as an educator.

Poindexter has been teaching at UCF since August 2000, where she is currently the coordinator of painting. She teaches undergraduate classes in intermediate and advanced painting every semester and an occasional class in advanced drawing and book arts. She also teaches the studio concentration graduate class every Spring semester in UCF’s MFA Studio Art and Design program where invited guest artists and field trips provide opportunities for students to experience the studio practices of professional visual artists.

Statement

In my paintings, drawings, and hand-colored etchings, I am constructing a synthetic world of characters and signs interacting in fields of micro and macro space that is both private and collective. I am engaged in a discovery of how space and form parallel human thought and emotion -- how we continuously endeavor to understand and respond to science and poetry, language and movement, time and space, and all manner of enigmatic human causes and effects.

When I draw, I force my hand to move left when it feels more natural to move right. Actions that are rapid and active, switch to delicate and deliberate. Marks become shapes; negative spaces become positive things. I like to surprise myself and force my response to what is happening on the surface. When I paint, image builds upon image. One layer often veils the next and embedded in layers of paint are traces of images that once initiated the next stage of thought. Many of the seemingly impenetrable surfaces in the paintings on canvas are full of visual contradictions where things that are obscure interact with things that are crystal clear.

Contact information:

Email: carla.poindexter52@gmail.com