I have a BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art. It was there that I found that I was an image maker and interested in the interplay between painting and the illusion of the real world. As an undergraduate, I studied for a year in Rome, Italy and discovered the important emotional and symbolic role of color. For five years between undergraduate and graduate school, I was an Army wife. In addition to becoming hyper-aware of the discrepancies of power between men and women in a patriarchal structure, I also discovered how women create a sub-structure in relation to patriarchy. Women tended to bond together in their aloneness and their supposed triviality. They also tended to usurp their husband’s rank and repeat the patriarchal power structure. Before graduate school, I spent a year in South Korea with my husband during his last military assignment. I found myself alone often and began to consider through my art how women formally present themselves in respect to each other and in relation to men. I also considered how women have found ways to create in seemingly menial ways, such as table-top centerpieces, baking, and personal and interior fashion. Often many of these creative endeavors went hand-in-hand with the historical feminine qualities of nurturing, pleasing, and supporting others. In my work I embrace and question these qualities. As I find myself pulled toward others in different directions, I often struggle to carve out a space for myself. I find this space in the artwork that I create.
Once in graduate school at Massachusetts School of Art for painting, I formally studied feminist theory, artist interpretations and contemporary reflections. One particular resource was a book written by Caroline Knapp, Appetites, Why Women Want. This book describes how women have un-realized desires that become displaced in eating or not eating, shopping, and low self-esteem. I found that there could be a connection between desire and objects of desire. I found that objects could be symbols of desire and the futility of desire’s displacement; while also realizing the inherent beauty in these objects and arrangements.
Once I began to understand my relation to desire and its displacement, I allowed images to unconsciously organize themselves. Most pieces are water-based paints on paper and gouache/acrylic on found doilies/fabric. I often use my own image and pile objects on top of my head. I reference outrageous 18th century wigs that not only contained hair but possibly boats, portraits, and jewelry. I think of indigenous women who carry their family’s daily sustenance on their heads. As a literal thinker, I visually imagine my thoughts floating above my head and how I can balance different aspects of my life. Often images may continue a verbal/visual pun.
Furniture is frequently evident as an object of desire and becomes symbolic of a human personality or aspects of a personality. Recently, I have removed my image and have focused on furniture piled and balanced upon itself in front of bold graphic images such as colored stripes, silhouetted toile, and floral wallpaper patterns. Large mural installations have evolved from these small detailed drawings. I paint the objects and furniture on unstretched canvas, cut them out, and apply them to a painted wall surface. This scale shift to life-size and the use of flat and illusionistic painting blurs the relation between the viewer’s physical space and imaginary space.

The comforts and tensions of domestic life, and the acquired roles of women, have been constant themes in my work. My most recent paintings, including works in gouache and watercolor on paper, explore psychological and domestic spaces created and influenced by children's games and imaginative role-playing. Quilts and blankets envelop tables and chairs, conjuring forts, fox dens and dens of thieves. The textiles -- rendered with expert handling of line, pattern and color -- simultaneously reveal and conceal. The furniture is arranged in untenable configurations, shaping unstable and irrational spaces. These illusionistic, escapist-leaning tableaux, like the notion of play itself, test the boundary between reality and fiction.

Candice Smith Corby earned her MFA in Painting at Massachusetts College of Art, and since then her work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows. She is currently the Cushing-Martin Gallery Director at Stonehill College, where she curates exhibitions and teaches studio art courses. Smith Corby is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Painting (2008), a Dave Bown Award recipient (2011), and has been a visiting artist and lecturer at several colleges in Massachusetts.