Carla Crawford graduated with degrees in Art Studio and Italian from the University of California, Davis, where she studied under the painter Wayne Thiebaud. While at the University of California, she spent a year in exchange at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy and an additional year studying at the Institute of Architecture in Venice. In Italy she became enamored with the traditional methods of oil painting and upon graduating she remained in the country for six months teaching art and art history and making master copies at the country’s national museums. Deciding to devote her full time efforts to drawing and painting in the classical tradition, Carla studied with the painter David Hardy in Oakland and then moved to New York to undertake a 3 year course of study in anatomy, portraiture and classical painting at the Grand Central Academy of Art and spent an additional year studying with the school’s director, Jacob Collins, in his private studio. From 2012-13 Carla spent the year in Spain studying the Spanish painters and making master copies at the Prado Museum.
Carla has been an artist-in-residence at the School of the Arts in San Francisco, the Hudson River Landscape Fellowship and at the Whiskeytown National Preserve in conjunction with the de Young Museum. She has received the Alfred Ross and Art Renewal Center Grants for Artistic Excellence and was given an Award of Exceptional Merit from the Portrait Society of America in 2016. She co-curated with Alessia Masi the Giorgio Morandi and Wayne Thiebaud exhibition at the Morandi Museum in Bologna, Italy in 2011. Her solo show, Reverie was exhibited at the Museo Casa de los Tiros in Granada, Spain in 2014. Her work is exhibited in galleries across the country and is included in the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum in California. She lives with her husband and sons in Sonoma County, California.
