Artist Profile

Carol S. McHarg has a studio in Philadelphia near Washington Square and commutes to New York weekly to teach landscape design at Columbia University. She is the author of the best selling book Nature's Design, published by Rodale Press, in which she explained how to design with nature. She has had several exhibitions worldwide including those at Brad Cooper Gallery, Florida and The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Her work is in many collections in Europe and the U.S.

The recent works of Carol S. McHarg push the boundaries of contemporary landscape painting. She expresses her history and ideology as a Landscape Architect and at the same time moves the history of art onto a new plane. These powerful paintings look at ecology, design, cartography and the impacts of engineers and designers to question what is natural and what is not.

This narrative is embodied not only in the subject matter, but also in the style and materiality of the work. The artist combines symbolism with reality, perspective with flatness and an exaggerated configuration of nature overlaid with an artificial reconfiguration of the landscape. She questions what is natural and what is man made in the world at large and in the painting itself.

Peter Reed, Senior Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs at The Museum of Modern Art states, "Carol's work provides a provocative commentary on the subject of contemporary landscape." Osvaldo Romberg, world-renowned artist, says her striking landscapes are beautiful without being decorative, inventive and also painterly." He refers to her work as "indefinable."

Carol explains, "This series does not provide visions or alternative perspectives of the future, but instead looks at the real world by addressing the visual results of the contemporary dialogue between man and nature.

The Biblical creation story in the first chapter of Genesis instructs man to dominate and conquer nature. Man was given exclusive divinity, a God given dominion over all things and was instructed to subdue the earth as a moral imperative. Our anthropomorphic and anthropocentric view of the supremacy and exclusive divinity of man has inflated the human ego and allowed us to exploit the earth in destructive and unprecedented ways."

Praise for Carol S. McHarg

"Carol's work provides a provocative commentary on the subject of contemporary landscape."
Peter Reed, Senior Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs at The Museum of Modern Art

"Carol creates images that are metaphors. She combines illusion and reality by incorporating real elements with an illusion of landscape. Her use of texture gives symbolic meaning to the landscape."
Osvaldo Romberg, world-renowned artist from Argentina