Award-Winning Artist, Carol Perron Sommerfield, to Open “FACETS” Exhibit in Larchmont

Carol Perron Sommerfield has won numerous awards over the past six years in juried competitions. Her latest show, featuring many works of art not previously exhibited, titled FACETS, opens in the Oresman Gallery at the Larchmont Public Library on November 2, and will continue to be on view through November 29. Additionally, there will be a reception in the Oresman Gallery on Saturday, November 5, from 2:30 to 4:30pm. Everyone is invited.

Carol Sommerfield took a 34-year break from art as she pursued a successful career as a corporate executive. She returned to painting in mid-2010. As she picked up her paint brushes after all those years, she realized that her art is not only about images, but also about her own transition and change.

Sommerfield uses representational images as metaphors for themes she is experiencing in her life and work and seeks to evoke a new way of seeing beauty in what is often overlooked in our busy lives. She has a love affair with color and light, and uses both to evoke mood and tell a story in oils, acrylics, pastels, and watercolors.

Sommerfield’s goal is to have the viewer experience the subject and to share her reaction to it. In this pursuit many artists have influenced her, each informing a challenge of interest to her as an artist. She is influenced with the work of Turner, Wolf Kahn, Eric Aho, Forrest Moses, Tom Thomson, and, more locally, Jock MacRae, Eleanor Goldstein, Meg Lindsay and Ellen Hopkin Fountain. What interests her about them is their ability to express the essential mood of a place through varying levels of abstraction. Sommerfield’s still lives have always been influenced by the work of Janet Fish in the 1970’s, and Edward Hopper is clearly an influence for her “Abandoned” series. The Abstract Expressionists have always informed her work and thinking.

“You have such different styles!” Sommerfield says she hears that a lot yet doesn’t see it that way at all. To her, the work hangs together on some basic, foundational elements. The execution may vary, whether in medium, subject, approach, or mood; but they are all related.

Carol Sommerfield is a bold painter who loves vibrancy and the punch of color and light. However, recently she has challenged herself to be more subtle. This summer the artist continued a series she started a few years ago – the “Mist” series. Here restraint is required and grey is the primary color. It is a very different facet of her style and she has enjoyed both the freedom and constraint that this series requires. Sommerfield is also moving off into abstraction in her watercolors and her series “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Blood”.

Carol Sommerfield is an optimist and ultimately, regardless of topic, that optimism is evident in her work. After 34 years of pent up desire to create art, she is exuberantly making up for lost time. Regardless of subject, mood, medium or technique, the things she is always concerned with are the same: color, composition, mood, and light. This is the glue that binds Carol Sommerfield’s work together.