Caitlin Carcerano sinks into the warm water, submerging everything but her hands, face, and knees, which poke sheepishly above the rim of her turquoise-colored tub. “The bath is a place where people can feel safe, taken care of, and healed,” says Caitlin, whose semi-autobiographical bathtime paintings invite curious onlookers into private spaces where healing rituals occur.
The color in these private spaces changes like a mood ring. On Wednesday, the ceramic tiles in Caitlin’s bathroom are blush pink; the next day, they might be seafoam green or swimming pool blue. Her figures lounge, slouch, slump, and loiter in forever cooling water, attempting to shake the psychic ick of the outside world. You imagine her plastic grocery bag busted in the parking lot earlier that day or that her package got lost in the post—it’s been that kind of day. “Each of my pieces exist as moments in time that are part of a larger narrative, like panels in a comic,” says Caitlin, whose meditative works blend traditional painting with elements of vintage illustration, graphic novels, and other “low-brow” art forms.
A competitive powerlifter, Caitlin’s reverence for the body bleeds into life outside the studio. “The softness of the human body is critical to my work,” she says. “The veneration of my body in the gym and the representation of the body in my work is not dissimilar.”
Painted with rounded lines and pop colors, Caitlin’s figures step out of the bath in works like “A Partial Eclipse” and “Meet Me in the Middle,” two jewel-toned oil portraits that reveal the progression of self over time. “The figures in my work, representing my past and present self, touch and interact, melting in and out of each other,” she says. Her risograph prints tread similar territory, adding a more subdued but no less pointed meditation on time, memory, forgiveness, and self-compassion to her oil paintings. “The figures can be amorphous, and it can be hard to discern where one figure starts and the other ends,” says Caitlin, who uses repetition as a metaphor for “memory, different versions of oneself, and the potential for growth and change.”
“The bath is a place where people can feel safe, taken care of, and healed.” — Caitlin Carcerano
Caitlin Carcerano: Website | Instagram
All photos published with permission of the artist(s).
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