Nellie Lowe Unit 4 : Charlotte Caron

Charlotte Caron

Charlotte Caron is a French artist and photographer who graduated with an honours in fine art in 2011. Her series of portraits on which she painted animal features on human faces was exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery. I really liked how the two mediums were combined together to create a unique and recognisable portrait, and despite being unrealistic I think the portraits looks very natural.
Rather than giving her work a title and letting her audience interpret it from there, Caron leave her work unnamed. The title of the series is very literal, it's simply titled “Animal Portraits over Human Portraits” She is aiming to represent duality in her work, she wants to show how despite also being entirely different, we humans and animals can also be very similar.

The paraphernalia used by Caron would be a DSLR to take the photographs of her human subjects, Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom used to brighten the contrast and edit any blemishes on her photographs to create a more flawless end product. The main part of her degree consisted of painting, and being rather skilled at it she produced some very realistic looking animal features over the human faces. The work is printed on a 1m x 1m canvas and then painted over using acrylic paint, and all her portraits are the same size in order to maintain continuity, even when the human subjects are different people or the masks are different animals.
In order to find all this information about her I visited her Facebook page, as well as her website, and I additionally found a French website which I read through. Because I speak French I was able to comprehend what the website says without the need of an online translation which could have misinformed me.
Here is the piece I have chosen to represent her art:

She created this piece in her third year of her degree in fine arts. She believes that everyone in our society lives behind a mask, which is what she wanted to highlight with this project. Combining the two mediums of photography and painting brings a new dimension to the subject's life, creating a new character, whilst still remaining anonymous.