Bronx, New York-based artist CarrieAnn Truitt uses her whimsical paintings of dragons to help her manage her daily life with Schizophrenia. CarrieAnn’s creatures are a mix of those mythical beings with butterflies and nature’s features.
I’m an artist who loves painting whimsical and fantastical things. I love making people smile. I have dabbled in every medium from oil paints to digital. I don’t feel like one should be constrained by medium—I enjoy experimenting with all of them. I’ll use whatever medium I feel best suits the project I am working on. Right now, it is dragons in watercolor. I chose watercolor because I wanted to capture the feeling of the old-fashioned scientific illustrations that I love. After I feel like I have made enough dragons, I plan on gathering the paintings into a book. Painting and drawing is something I have always done, but I never imagined that people would want to buy my art. My husband saw the potential for me to turn art into my job, and now he sells my artwork out of our little pop-up gallery. I have to admit, he had to drag me kicking and screaming into giving selling my art a chance, and I am glad he did.
CarrieAnn Truitt