In your wanderings downtown you may have walked into a gallery on Gurley St. and been hit with an explosion of color. Carrie Weldon opened her self-named gallery just over a year ago, and the venture has grown and morphed into a lively, successful business.
I write artist profiles often for this magazine and have been checking in on Carrie regularly to follow her work and her gallery. When I first visited, shortly before the gallery opened, I found Carrie in a room full of large, bold canvases with a wide-eyed look that said, “Am I really doing this?” Over the months she has added jewelry and now clothing, while sales of her paintings have steadily grown. Her gallery/boutique is filled with colorful racks of “cozy, casual, professional” clothing that just make you want to root through them and find something fun.
Originally from North Dakota, Carrie left the midwest for California at age 19. She soon met and married her husband and had a daughter. She and her husband started a chain of coffee shops, which were successful, so they made plans to open more.
Though Carrie wasn’t yet a painter, part of the business concept was color. While visiting her father-in-law, who lived in Prescott, Carrie wandered into the Newman Gallery (till recently a fixture on Whiskey Row) and fell in love with Dave Newman’s work. She bought a number of his pieces for her coffee shops. The business grew till 2008, when like many they found themselves overextended and had to close down entirely.
The family moved to Prescott, and Carrie worked for UPS for a time. During this period Carrie and her mother wanted to do a fun project together and decided to take up painting. They didn’t take a class, but just dove in. Carrie had found a new passion, and began producing lots of paintings, buying paint by the gallon. Once she had accumulated a body of work, someone from The Raven invited her to show her work on the walls there, and she sold several paintings, which led to the idea of opening a gallery.
Carrie’s work is bold and textural. She doesn’t use brushes or even a palette knife. Her tool of choice for applying paint to canvas is credit cards. Surely there’s a message in there somewhere.
She begins her painting process by choosing a color palette, then making a basic outline, then walking away for a time before coming back and beginning to apply color. She “hears” when a piece is done. Some pieces come quickly, while others can take six months to finish. She often does themed series, like guitars, hearts or bottles, and her pieces go well side-by-side on the wall.
Carrie doesn’t stay still for long and is always working on the next thing. Since expanding the clothing offerings she is working on using the alley space behind the gallery for other artists to sell their work, hoping to add access to food, either from an adjacent restaurant or food truck. I expect she’ll pull it off. It’s worth visiting her gallery just to meet Carrie. She’s lovely, perky and easy to talk to. “I color outside the box!” Her box is certainly growing, adding a great splash of color to our downtown art scene.
Visit Carrie Weldon Art and Boutique on Gurley Street next to Whiskers Barkery or online at carrieweldon.com. The gallery is a participating member of Prescott’s monthly 4th Friday Art Walk.
