Carla O’Connor Painter USA 1945

Carla O’Connor Painter USA 1945
In the late 50s, Fields moved her Mother to Wauwatosa, Wisconsin where Carla entered high school.  Upon graduation she went to Kent State University in Ohio where she got her Bachelor of Fine Art with a major in painting. The art department at Kent State gave students a good foundation in art with emphasis on drawing and design. The students were not allowed to paint until they were seniors. Working from live models all those years, made the human form the touchstone of her work. It is the thing she knows well inside and out. Students were required to draw the skeleton – the muscles and bones – and know all the names. That is the root from which the tree of her later imaginative, figurative art grew. “When they finally let us paint, we practically exploded onto the canvas.” she says. She also studied art at the University of the Americas in Mexico City, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Ohio. She is a midwestern girl at her roots. 
Carla doesn’t remember a specific moment when she thought “I want to be an artist”. She was always an artist. It was what she knew how to do. For Carla, art school was for honing her skills in various mediums, gaining knowledge and appreciation of art history, exposure to new perceptions and ideas, credentials and coming of age. To be an artist would be a lifetime pursuit.
At Kent, she met her future husband, Mike O’Connor, who was planning on going into the Air Force. Mike and Carla married straight out of college. Within six months he got his first assignment from the Air Force to the “huge” city of Big Spring, Texas. They lived in fourteen different homes in twenty-two years. Still there was only one year where Carla didn’t paint; it was during the Vietnam war when Mike was gone. In the early years of her marriage Carla lugged her babies, sons Colin and Ryan, with her to outdoor art fairs. She has photos of six-week-old in a basket at one art fair. Carla’s creativity rubbed off a little. Both of her sons studied artistic pursuits in college.  One studied acting and the other music though both have gone on to other pursuits in adult life. 
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