Carolyn Swisczc

"Food Court, Santa Fe NM"  acrylic, relief ink and rubber stamp on canvas  48" x 73"  2011

"Whitney Lobby #1"   acrylic and relief ink on canvas  36" x 48"  2011

"Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, Austin TX"  acrylic and rubber stamp on canvas  48" x 73"  2011

"Karate Extreme"  acrylic, ink, relief ink and rubber stamp  18" x 22"  2005

"Showcase Cinemas, Revere MA"  acrylic, relief ink and rubber stamp on canvas  48" x 72"

Carolyn Swiszcz (pronounced Swiz for those like me who have to be hear every word or name in their heads) is an artist currently in St. Paul Minnesota, whose work is like a series of encounters with modern American architecture, both ordinary and extraordinary, banal and peculiar, and often all of these at once. She has a vivid graphic style using acrylic paints, printmaking techniques and even rubber stamps, that somehow captures a surreal atmosphere to scenes we might otherwise pay little or no attention to; a strip mall, a lobby, an old motel, the marquis for a suburban cinema. Through composition and careful attention to patterns and shapes, she draws out details of the innocuous and makes them interesting with the simple trick of forcing us to look at them. She seems to see through the ordinary and find within it, not banality, but a delicate mood of acute nostalgia and haunting melancholy. The addition of figures in some of her more recent work, often an adult with a child, brings a degree of warmth to the images, but suggests to me that the haunting quality is in part the haunting of our own childhood, that often too dimly remembered time when nothing was ordinary, simply because everything was new. Recapturing that perception and communicating it with an adult's knowledge and skill, is essentially the very heart of the artistic endeavor.
You can see more at her website: www.carolynswiszcz.com
There are a lot of images available and slightly larger at here gallery's site: stevenzevitasgallery.com

thanks to the folks at http://www.booooooom.com for posting her work.