Caroline Cespedes (2001, Plantation, FL) is a multimedia artist based in South Florida whose work explores animals and their emotional capacity through carefully painted acrylic portraits. Her artistic abilities spread beyond the physical canvas and into the world of digital art forms, including illustrations, hand colored digital photography, and animation. Her unique graphic style emphasizes connection and invokes empathy through detailed rendering of the animals’ eyes. Her work has been exhibited across two juried exhibitions at Nova Southeastern University, where she first studied the arts and earned two Bachelor’s Degrees in Theatre and Art and Design, respectively. She is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she plans to leverage her new experience and skills into a career in the arts to advocate for animal rights, ideally through collaborations with rescue centers, wildlife conservation campaigns, and National Parks.
Bio
Artist Statement
My paintings are tangible reflections of the love I have received from the animal kingdom and the love I choose to reciprocate in return. Each and every piece I make serves as a record of the animals’ individual lives and legacies. Just as humans are, every single animal is different and can have a unique identity, despite being of the same species, and I wish to share that knowledge with the contemporary art world through animal portraiture.
Whether I am using solely greys or all the colors in the spectrum, my practice relies on hue interaction contrast. I never use the same color scheme twice, but I always add to my current palette by mixing new hues together or pulling individual colors from previous works. Instead of sketching my subjects on the canvas in advance, I create and lay shapes of color on top of one another, which culminates in a visage of the given subject’s body when viewed from a distance.
To gain a better understanding of who they are, I try to learn the names of my subjects and personally meet them beforehand. Even if they have not been given a name by other humans, most people still require that convention to get attached in any meaningful way. I prioritize capturing the detail in the subjects’ eyes across all of my work. While animals cannot speak the human language, they can still convey unspoken emotions to viewers through their painted gaze.
