Spark Spotlight Artist: Interdisciplinary Artist Courtney Carballido
Interdisciplinary artist Courtney Carballido works in several different mediums, including photography, painting, sculpting, and even woodworking. Originally from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Courtney has been focusing particularly on photo montage recently, merging photos (digitally or by-hand) to create an image that doesn’t exist.
Courtney attended Louisiana State University in hopes to pursue Marine Biology, but her love for the fine arts motivated her to switch to an Interior Architecture degree. She transferred to Rhode Island School of Design and got her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design in 1990. After graduating, Courtney went to New York to work for Random House Publishing, designing book covers for paperbacks in the Ballantine Division. After a year, she returned to New Orleans and opened her own design business that she operated for ten years. After her divorce, Courtney moved to Western North Carolina and now lives just outside Black Mountain. She is currently working on an art series of shield-like pieces inspired by the Bible verse, Ephesians 6, describing the armor of God. Courtney is also editing a book she has written on how God has manifested himself in her life.
1. How did you become interested in art?
My mother studied art in college. She was a portrait and still life painter and taught art lessons to children at our house. Although she never taught me, I would sit in the next room and listen to what she was teaching. When we were kids, she had a drawer that she would fill with paints, pastels, linoleum blocks, wire and wax, and all kinds of things. If it was raining outside, we’d say, “Mama, what can we do?” She’d say, “Go to the drawer.” And I could take any of the materials in there and just play with them and express myself. I think it came naturally through my mother and through seeing the world in a certain way.
2. Who or what is your biggest inspiration?
When I was younger, I loved Paul Klee because his work was very symbolic and abstract, playful and ethereal. I also like Frida Kahlo. She had a terrible accident when she was young. It disabled her in a way that she had to spend a lot of time in bed. I related to that because of the Lyme disease that I had for many years. Clyde Connell is a Louisiana artist who I also like. She’s another artist who had her own visual language that was so unique.
3. What is most important to you in your art?
The most important thing is to convey a message to people, and to put something out into the world that benefits others, something beautiful that evokes a thought or a positive feeling. There is a spiritual thread that I’ve always had in my work, something that connects the existence of light and dark in the human experience and connects them together. For me, I think that knowing God and having a relationship with Jesus Christ has been the biggest blessing of anything in my life.
4. What are some of the challenges that you have faced in your work?
Shortly after I moved overseas for a time, I got Lyme Disease. I had it for ten years. It was horrific. I was bedridden for the better part of six years. Oftentimes, I couldn’t even stand up and didn’t have energy to do much. So, I would take photographs and cut them up and create a collage. That’s how that [Photo Montage] process came to be. My limitation actually created something new that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
5. What are your goals for the future as an artist?
The work I’m doing now is lighter, more joyful, less abstract. I have become more bold about sharing my beliefs in my work. I’d like to get into more collaborative work with other artists, specifically Christian artists, because I think that would be really interesting. I’m always interested in the spiritual aspect of life and the human experience.