Carol Steinberg

I have been oil painting since I was 8 years old.

My first paintings were of the Breck Shampoo Girl illustrations on the backs of magazines. I now believe I was engaged in an attempt to connect with the Feminine as a result of not living with my mother from the age of 3. I felt a deep need to express myself and my pain through painting and writing.

Eventually I came to a place of wanting to paint for its own sake and I chose flowers as a vehicle to allow me to explore with color, light, and composition, to play with paint, squeezing and mixing luscious colors onto my palette and canvas. I\'m not interested in the subject as I work, but in an abstract game with rules that allow me to ultimately dance with energy--emotional and spiritual.

Again, I enjoy the paradoxical edge of the surface skin of paint that alludes to a deeper reality that unifies it all. I want to express/allow freedom, joy, spirit.

Steinberg has exhibited nationally in numerous galleries and museums. She has taught drawing, design, and painting at Los Angeles City College, Cal State University at Northridge, and Otis Evening College. She earned her MFA at CalArts and BFA and BA from Cornell University and has received scholarships from art programs around the country.

Her work has been published, won prizes, been listed as an LA Times ?Best Bet? and chosen for Eddie Murphy?s film Daddy Day Care, as well as other film and TV projects. In the fall of 2008, a dozen of her paintings appeared on the award winning TV show House in an episode about a painter with a disturbing vision problem.

Critics have said ?Steinberg can really paint with confidence and swagger?She paints in volumes and in strong personal tonalities of mood and color. Vibrant blues, greens and purple, raw, unpainted canvas, erotic or banal, the compositions express a balance of strenuous oppositions?Even a brilliant bathroom portrait takes on an atmosphere of carnival brightness.?