Artist Carla Grace

I am Carla Grace. I am a wildlife artist that works in acrylic and oil paint, creating realistic animals that seem to interact with you from the space within the painting. I was born in South Africa, but grew up in Zimbabwe, New Zealand and Zambia. My early childhood years in Zimbabwe exposed me to a life full of wildlife, and that formed the foundation of my career as a wildlife artist.

I now live on 14 acres in Aldinga Beach, South Australia with my husband and two young children.

I paint in a traditional, realistic style. Most people call what I do photorealism, however, to be technical, my work is not refined enough to be quite that perfect. I call my style realism, as what I depict, the details and the nature of my work is very close to being real. However, when you move up to the canvas and look closely at the brush work, there are clumps of paint, areas of incomplete details and many artist marks all over the work. I don’t want to take away from the artwork the fact that it was created by a human hand as opposed to being printed. I find that there is great beauty in imperfections, and I love that my work still looks like a painting when you take the time and care to inspect it.

I began my career at the age of 17, when I would draw portraits for pocket money during high school. As people would happily pay upwards of $150 for a portrait done by a teenager, I figured that there was something unique in what I did. I tried to study art at university in Auckland, New Zealand, but found the disconnect between academic art and commercial art to be too large. I didn’t fit in with the academic world, as my business mind was too keen and spoke too logically about what I had experienced on my own outside of art school. This led to many arguments with the tutors, and so I dropped out at the end of 2014, after achieving my diploma and moved to Australia where I registered as a sole trader within the year. Carla Grace Art became my official business in 2015. I became a full-time artist in 2018 after slowly transitioning away from my day jobs as the demand for my work increased.

I am inspired by nature first, by the beauty I can feel and see around me. I am motivated by the potential wildlife art has in the overall narrative of art history. Its lack of presence there gives me hope that throughout my career, and through uplifting other wildlife artists along the way, we can make wildlife art a significant genre. I see it as a challenge to accept, knowing that other areas of art, portraiture, still life, landscapes and so on, have been done so well by so many others over hundreds of years. Realistic wildlife art is criticised by many as being pointless, the most common comment being “why not just take a picture?”. I am inspired by the critiques as much as by the potential I’ve found in the art form. My work is going beyond the photographs, indeed, making it impossible to capture in a photograph what I capture in my paintings.

I love that the animals feel as though they are about to take a breath at any moment. That they feel alive. Like I have been able to give others an opportunity to connect with an animal in a unique and permanent way. Above any other ambition of mine, my work would be a failure if I could not give the eyes of the animal’s life, without that there would be no spirit to my work.