Carlene Shuler Brown Is Painting Again

Carlene Shuler Brown is back.

Once an active part of the local arts scene, Brown withdrew for several years after the death of her husband. But she has recently reimmersed herself.

A native of Savannah, Georgia, Brown liked to draw as a child, often copying girls in fashionable outfits from the newspaper and from Archie comic books. She got married right out of high school and started painting a few years later, buying her first paint set with green stamps.

When her youngest child was 12, she went to work in the business office at the Anderson Independent-Mail, where she served in a variety of roles over eight years. During that time, she started capturing homes and businesses in watercolor for clients she found by advertising in the newspaper. She had started out using oils but took some watercolor classes with Carol McDaniel and got hooked. “Carol’s work had detail but also soft washes,” Brown said. “I loved that.”

Brown’s work can be seen at various places in town, including three pieces at the main hospital and 10 pieces at the health campus, as well as in banks and in the offices of doctors and lawyers. She also sold a lot of paintings through her volunteer work with the Anderson Soiree.

In 1989, Brown opened an art gallery and frame shop on Main Street in downtown Anderson. “I was the first person to have other local artists’ work in a gallery,” she said. Her husband worked with her, cutting and assembling the frames. When he died in 2011, she closed the shop and quit everything else she had been involved in, including the Anderson Artists Guild. “I went into a two-and-a-half-year depression,” she said.

These days, Brown is again painting and has branched out into mixed media. She recently won a juried show award for a stained paper collage piece. She’s also writing a romantic suspense novel called Dangerous Entanglements.

For more information about brown, visit https://www.carleneshulerbrown.com/.