ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
CARMEN VERDI
AN ARMY BRAT
Born at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in 1968, my life started as a military brat. We moved from Jersey to Texas to New Hampshire and Philadelphia before settling in Lowell, Massachusetts. I was inspired to make art by watching my father sketch cartoon characters and Captain Bob's television program on Saturdays in the late '70s; I began drawing by entering drawing competitions from the weekly TV guide and copying art from comic books with a pencil when I was ten.
LIFE BEGINS
My journey in art began at Lowell Vocational Technical School for commercial art, where I improved my skills and later worked as a paste-up artist at Beacon Communications in Acton, Massachusetts. Despite my passion, financial constraints prevented me from attending art school, leading me to serve with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell.
After the military, I married, had children, and started a business. After a brutal divorce, I lost everything and had to rebuild my life from scratch.
FALSELY ACCUSED
My career as an artist developed during an unjust time in my life. In 2002, I met my new partner, and we married in 2003. In 2005, I was wrongly accused of a crime and jailed at the House of Corrections in Middleton, Massachusetts. During this challenging time, I drew portraits for inmates, and they paid me food for these sketches. After 91 days, the jury found me not guilty on January 6th, 2006, cleared all charges, and released me.
A NEW START
After being released from jail, I continued drawing, and my art soon caught people's attention. They wanted to buy my drawings, which led me to share my work publicly for the first time in 2014 in Nashua, New Hampshire. Since then, my art has been shown in art shows and galleries in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and Cincinnati, gaining me collectors of my work.
This picture was the first time I had shown my work to the public.
Arthub
Nashua, NH
2014
WHAT IS "LINEILLISM?"
2006 - 2024
In 2006, while working at a golf course, I stumbled upon a unique drawing technique that would change my artistic journey. One morning, I challenged myself to create a drawing of a boxer in just five minutes, with my coworkers timing me as I worked from a reference photo. To meet the challenge, I used fast line marks to create the drawing, and from that minute on, this line work became my signature style. Today, I use thousands of side-by-side pencil lines to make my drawings. I do not cross-hatch or blend. This technique has allowed me to express my creativity in a way that feels distinctly my own. Join me in celebrating the beauty and the endless possibilities of art.