Biography

Carina Francioso is a Canadian contemporary realist painter whose practice is devoted to water: its light, motion and mutability. Working on aluminum, wood panel and canvas, she builds her surfaces through thin, meticulously blended layers of oil, a process that renders the most transient of events (a wave at the instant it breaks, light shifting across its surface) with near-photographic fidelity while insisting on the slow time of its making.

Her imagery is rooted in lived experience: adolescent summers on Georgian Bay and, since the age of sixteen, seasons on the Salento coast of southern Italy. The sea is her constant subject, observed in states from stillness to turbulence. Within this practice sits a body of self-portraits in which the artist’s own figure is submerged and held by water, extending her inquiry into the bond between water and the feminine: strength, fragility, renewal.

Francioso is a recipient of the 2019 Arcadia Contemporary Gallery Award and the Bernice Adams Memorial Visual Arts Award, and has served multiple times as a juror for the Boynes Emerging Artist Award. Her work has been broadcast on RAI Television and featured in American Art Collector, Hyperrealism Magazine, GRAND, Panoram Italia and the Art Renewal Center’s International Realism Salon catalogue. It is held in private and corporate collections internationally, including the collection of Her Highness Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of the Dubai royal family.

Francioso also teaches online: learn to paint water in oil with her course, Oil Painting Pros.