Reimagining nature: Bedford artist paints the town

Bedford artist Carol Bouyoucos works, left to right, "One Hot Lily",  "Hellebore Study." and "Marsh Dreams".

Bedford artist Carol Bouyoucos

By JOYCE CORRIGAN

Being a master manipulator, Carol Bouyocos is the first to say, has been a secret to her unstoppable success. “I am a digital painter or digital collagist,” the Bedford artist explained. “I shoot with an iPhone and manipulate my pictures through various AI apps, like Photoshop.” Her chosen medium may depend on cutting-edge, emergent technologies, but the result couldn’t be more timelessly beautiful and swooningly romantic.  

Not to mention, sought after. Fresh from a show at the Katonah Village Library, Bouyoucos’ work currently hangs in Art Show: Bedford, and in a permanent installation at Bedford Post Tavern. Next month she’s half of a two-woman show at Yellow Studio in Cross River, and in March she’ll be featured in a group exhibition called “Biophilia” at the Greenwich Library’s Flinn Gallery.

“Works on paper, murals or objects, my works all explore a hypothetical and highly curated natural world,” she said. “While I incorporate imagery from early American and European landscape and botanical artists to evoke a nostalgia for nature, my art-making has always been shaped by technology.  I embrace the digital medium to distort, reshape and reimagine the parallel narrative of nature’s rapid reshaping,” she explained.

Does the artist choose the medium or the medium the artist? Often a technique appears just when an artist needs it to realize their specific vision. As early as the fifth century, Byzantine artists came to believe mere paint wasn’t sufficient to depict the sacredness of God, and so augmented the ancient technique of gold-leafing — laboriously hammering and manipulating gold into thin sheets and then mixing with pigments — in order to create shimmering gold “divine light” halos or backdrops in their portraits of Jesus, Moses, and other sacred icons. 

At a time when our environment is shifting before our eyes, what better than AI technology to enable Bouyoucos to remaster and thus immortalize an endangered natural world on canvas? 

“The themes in my work explore a natural world where the boundaries between nature and culture compete,” she stated, “This unsettles the narrative of humanity in control.”There’s no use denying the zeitgeist, and Bouyoucos’ current body of work clearly meshes with one of the defining moods in the art world, that of celebrating and conserving nature. The very names of her shows speak volumes: “Plant Based” at the Bedford Playhouse in 2024, “Paradise Found” at the Gallery Arte Azulejo in Manhattan and “Eden” at the Lagstein Gallery in Nyack, both in 2022, and “Wild by Nature” at the CB Gallery in 2019. 

Bouyoucos has lived in Bedford for 28 years and raised two children here. Nine years ago, she moved to a property on one of Bedford’s many historic nature preserves, where she soon joined the board of trustees and became the cottage’s caretaker. “I moved there for a change of lifestyle,” she recalled, “I was literally looking for a sanctuary.” Her studio occupies a good portion of the cottage, and, she admits, seems to encroach on more and more of it. “The sanctuary grounds have had a tremendous effect on the way I portray nature,” she mused, “I’m out and about with my iPhone, witnessing this untamed landscape with invasive vines choking great trees. It inevitably sparks complex narratives of an imbalance in the natural world.” 

Bouyoucos doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but she never stops asking questions. 

“I continue to explore in my practice. Have we romanticized nature with symbolic representations? Are we paying attention to nature’s rapid reshaping?” adding, “Through my art, I will continue to depict nature as the force that she is.”

For more information, visit carolgreenanbouyoucos.com or on Instagram, @bouyoucos.