Mad Carl Art
Current work in our gallery by artist Carl Ristaino.
Carl Ristaino is an accomplished artist with the nickname “Mad Carl,” which came about early in his career due to his unique drawing style and wild curly “mad” scientist-esq hair.
Carl paints through intuition; sometimes a certain line, brush stroke, color or texture just feels and looks right. He seeks to capture that blurry memory, that corner-of-the-eye hallucination inside of a fever dream, the almost untranslatable sensation that is there and then gone.
As a self-styled illustrator, his inspiration draws from music, nature, Egyptian hieroglyphics, primitive art, the divine and the mundane. Ongoing themes in Carl's work include expressionistic cityscapes that are grown organically across the canvas and stylistic bar scenes which are populated with bizarre characters and charged emotions.
He seeks to incorporate an element of mystery in his work that he hopes will inspire the viewer to 'fill in the blanks" of the painting’s story. These elements may appear to have a life of their own, almost existing before and after the painting was made.
