Caron Post

Venice, California, United States

Biography

Caron Post is a painter working primarily in oil, painting portraits and figurative work alongside still lifes and scenes drawn from daily life. She is drawn to subjects — human and otherwise — that hold more than their surface suggests, placing them in settings specific enough to reveal something true about who or what they are. Her recent work explores themes of transition, memory, and transformation, often finding those qualities in ordinary or domestic objects as readily as in the human face. She brings a background as a psychologist and psychotherapist to her interest in the layered, often hidden meaning beneath a face or an object, and lives and paints in Venice, California.

Artist Statement

Art has been an enduring passion in my life. In this painting, a wedding dress lies among stones and fallen leaves. It’s not abandoned but rather placed there, given over
on purpose, so the earth could take it back and make something else out of it. There's a beginning inside this dress — the day it was made for, the vow it stood in for.

But there's an ending in it too, and a new beginning right alongside that ending. As the lace settles into the stones and leaves, it stops being about one day and starts being part of something bigger — the ground, the season, the turning of things. And then it becomes a painting, which is its own kind of beginning again — something someone else will stand in front of one day and feel their own way through.

I keep coming back to this idea in my work, whether I'm painting a person or an object: that things hold more than what's on the surface, and that placing them in a particular context is a way to get at what they really are. This dress, in stones and leaves instead of on a body, is doing that same work — showing a different side of itself than it ever could hanging in a closet or even on a person.

I often paint people — their faces, their gestures, the rooms and light around them — because I'm looking for that same thing there too: what's underneath, what a moment is made of. This dress felt like a portrait in its own way, just without a face. I hope what comes through here is a sense that while we experience loss and things
end, they also keep becoming something else.