Carla Pagliaro | Passages

black and gold #5

acrylic on canvas

36 x 48 inches

2025

Carla Pagliaro

passages

Carla Pagliaro has lived and painted in Livingston, Montana since the early 1990s. Following art school at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she spent over a decade in Los Angeles working as a scenic artist in the film and television industries. Her large, immersive, canvases explore the dynamic relationships between reality and intuition.

She works in series because “life changes and different things appeal and resonate at different times.” Often just the feeling of certain colors will set off a whole series. Repeating elements and motifs, such as fire and ornate picture frames, keep reappearing. Looking back, she sees that “the series alternate between light and dark, though that was never intentional, it’s just what happened.

Pagliaro welcomes viewer engagement, musing:

“I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to look at paintings.
The viewer responds either positively, negatively or not at all.
I purposely give the paintings purely descriptive or numerical titles
because I don’t want to direct what the viewer sees or feels.”—CP

All images ©Carla Pagliaro.