Biography
Carol Crump Bryner was born in Wallingford, Connecticut and educated at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts and at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. She has lived and worked for over forty years in Anchorage, Alaska where her paintings and works on paper appear in many public and private collections including the Anchorage Museum, the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, and the Elmendorf Air Force Base Hospital.
Since 1975 she has exhibited in solo and group shows in Juneau and Kenai, and in Anchorage, Alaska at the Decker Morris Gallery, the Anchorage Museum, the International Gallery of Contemporary Art, and the Artique Gallery. In 2002 she received the Municipality of Anchorage Mayor’s Individual Artist Award. Her work is featured in the January 1997 issue of American Artist Magazine, and in the book “Icebreakers: Alaska’s Most Innovative Artists” by Julie Decker.
Carol and her husband Alex divide their time between Anchorage, Alaska and Portland, Oregon, where their son and daughter and grandchildren live.
Statement
2010, oil on canvas, 34” x 26”
For most of my adult life I’ve lived and worked in Anchorage, Alaska. The winters are long and dark, the summers bright and frantic, and the landscape beautiful, intimidating, and aloof. In my paintings and in my travels I seek escape from these extremes. When I’m not coping with the elements in the far north, my favorite places to be and to paint are Connecticut, Maine, Hawaii, and California.
But whether I’m painting a doorway on the island of Kauai, or a room in an old house in Cushing, Maine, it’s always light that’s the real subject of my work – light and its power to enhance the everyday.
In a review of my June 2011 show of paintings at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, Dawnell Smith wrote:
“How long can an artist use oil, ink, and collage as a means for peering through doors and windows? A long, long time if you consider Carol Crump Bryner’s body of work. For decades now, Bryner has fashioned exquisite renderings of light and shadow, of vertical planes giving way to broad swathes of land or sea, of architectural lines against a swirl of foliage or wilderness…
Her work speaks intelligently about the emotional movement between interior spaces and the enormity of the presumed context beyond…Tension exists not because of the dramatic, but rather because of the familiar limits to what we see…”