Carol Es, contemporary, self-taught artist, Los Angeles, specializing in garment patterns and oil paintings with embroidery.

"Am I a hybrid, or a mongrel?" a question that many of us have asked in one way or another. For Carol Es the answer is found in dream-like landscapes that combine simple, organic design with playful mockery, science and wry humor.

Garment patterns used throughout the work were initially a subconscious reaction to her childhood - reclaiming the tools of a family trade that had previously been reminders of many dark personal memories. As she began to meld this media with scientific, botanical and cartoon imagery, the universality of the work emerged.

Mechanisms of heredity are essentially the same for all complex life forms, and genealogical questions arise when we think about who we are, where we came from, and how we are related to other living things. A visual question-and-answer to the peculiarities and mysteries of nature vs. nurture, Hybrids and Mongrels was inspired by Mendelian Genetics.

Gregor Mendel was the 19th century Austrian scientist who created the basis of modern genetic science by experimenting on pea plants. A monk in a Czechoslovakian monastery, Mendel bred thousands of pea plant hybrids with different traits, such as blossom color, pod color, shape and position. He concluded that physical traits are passed through the genetic factors we now know as dominant-recessive inheritance.

The idea that dysfunction, habit, mutation and contagion in both physiology and botany can be part of an evolutionary process in creating art is explored in the work, venerating both the artist’s ancestry, and the divine invention of nature.