05 - Karen Carson, Big Red 

Karen Carson
American, b. 1943

Big Red
2016
Acrylic on unstretched canvas
80 x 96 inches
Collection of the Artist
L.2021.1.1

Karen Carson was born in Corvallis, Oregon, in 1943. She received her BA from University of Oregon, Eugene, and her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of California, Los Angeles. Carson debuted as an artist in 1971 with wall pieces made of zippered canvases that could be reconfigured to create multiple abstract compositions. Since then, her work has continued to shift and change as she explored a wide variety of genres and mediums. Her projects seem unified by a desire to represent the flux of visual reality, manifested both in nature and culture.

This piece, Big Red, is part of a larger series of paintings that Carson did from 2012-2016 that focused on large agricultural equipment, including combines, tractors, and swathers. Carson is based in Los Angeles, but also has a home in Montana where she spends part of the year. There, she not only appreciates the vast landscape, but also the vehicles that transform that landscape. To Carson, a tractor is an imposing vehicle, an economic reality and a cultural symbol of agriculture. Characteristic of the series, Carson anthropomorphizes her subject, the tractor, making it, as art writer Michael Duncan notes, “an affectionate portrait of masculinity with an eye for the humorous nature of male vanity.”