Cara Romano: Layered Light, at Extraordinaire

Sunlight slips across a floor, sketching transient geometries that stretch, fracture, and disappear with the passing hours. Shadows gather and dissolve, forming momentary constellations before vanishing altogether. It is within these fleeting gestures that Cara Romano locates her practice. Working across watercolor, ink, gouache, charcoal, collage, and oil, Romano attends to the subtle choreography of illumination, translating ephemeral encounters with light into layered compositions that hover between abstraction and observation. Her work renders the intangible tangible, elevating ordinary moments of light and shadow into meditative fields of perceptual depth. At its core, the practice is about paying attention.

Romano’s engagement with light has long been central to her work. While studying at Ohio University, she developed a disciplined, hands-on approach rooted in direct observation. Drawing from cast shadows and reflected sunlight—without reliance on photography—she treated light as both subject and collaborator. During this period, her practice moved fluidly between installation and abstract painting, with process functioning as an integral part of the finished work. Shadows became compositional guides, sunlight acted as a moving brush, and sustained-looking mattered as much as mark-making itself. Each gesture records a moment already in the act of disappearing.

After graduate school, the absence of a dedicated studio prompted a shift in scale and medium. Romano turned toward more intimate works, with watercolor emerging as a primary language, often layered with pen-and-ink drawing and collage. These compositions grew dense and cartographic, weaving symbolic and representational elements into intricate visual narratives. Influenced by her studies in art therapy, the work traced interior and exterior landscapes at once, balancing emotional resonance with formal precision. Even as the emphasis shifted from direct observation to compositional orchestration, light remained the underlying pulse—an organizing force guiding structure, rhythm, and tone.

The paintings in Layered Light emerged during the suspended time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Settled into a new home and studio for the first time in over a decade, Romano returned to oil painting, using photographs of shifting shadows and reflections as points of departure. From these sources, she built surfaces through accumulated brushstrokes and restrained fields of color. Stripped of overt symbolism or recognizable scenes, the work places light and shadow at its center. What remains is both immediate and contemplative—light observed, remembered, and slowly reassembled through paint.

Romano’s process is both methodical and intuitive. Drawing directly from light and shadow, she maintains an analog sensibility that privileges duration, attention, and material responsiveness. Gouache allows her to test opacity and translucency, while oil paintings engage density and weight. These works exist in dialogue with minimal watercolors and ink drawings, creating a steady exchange between restraint and accumulation, delicacy and saturation. Across media, each surface records subtle oscillations of light—the way it bends, pools, fractures, and recedes over time.

Her visual language reflects a hybrid training in sculpture, performance, and art history. Early experiments in assemblage, installation, and time-based performance inform her sensitivity to space and surface, while a foundation in figurative drawing provides structural clarity. Romano’s paintings are not simply records of what is seen; they operate as testing grounds where perception, memory, and material meet. Shadows become topographies, reflections loosen into atmospheric fields, and the everyday rhythms of light begin to carry narrative weight.

Born in 1980 in Schenectady, New York, and raised in Oberlin, Ohio, Romano developed an early attentiveness through realistic and figurative drawing. Her undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago (BA, 2002) expanded her engagement with sculpture and installation, while graduate work at Ohio University (MFA, MA, 2007) solidified her commitment to time-based, analog processes. Over the course of her career, she has moved fluidly between media and scale. The focus, however, has remained consistent: careful looking, sustained observation, and the transformation of fleeting phenomena into resonant form.

In Layered Light, Romano renders the ephemeral with quiet authority, each work functioning as both record and reverie—a calibrated balance of attentiveness and intuition. In an era shaped by speed and immediacy, her paintings insist on the slowness of seeing. Light fractures into pools of color, shadows trace provisional maps across the surface, and ordinary moments are granted sustained attention. The result is a body of work that asks not simply to be viewed, but to be dwelled within. Layered Light opens to the public from 5 to 9 pm on Friday, April 17, during the 78th Street Studios Art Walk.

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EVENTS:

Layered Light: Cara Romano, April 17–June 19. Opening reception 5-9pm Friday, April 17. Closing reception 5-9pm Friday, June 19. More information: caralynnromano.com or instagram.com/clromanoart