Carmen Schaar-Walden was born in San Diego, California and currently lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She showed a talent for art at a very early age that continued through high school, eventually earning a bachelor’s degree in Applied Art from San Diego State University.

Carmen has been privileged to live in many parts of the United States such as southern California, Washington state, Wyoming and Oklahoma. Experiencing America from these different perspectives made Carmen want to showcase her varing natural surroundings. In addition, she began taking cross-country road trips while in college, sketching and photographing America’s enormous diversity and natural beauty. These sketches and photographs, that continue today, are the start of Carmen’s creative process and the focus of her artwork.  Carmen prefers the flexibility of acrylic paint as her primary medium, but additionally works in oil and watercolor. Carmen is influenced by Post-Impressionism and California Impressionism.

She hopes to capture the patterns and rhythms she sees in nature in her paintings. Another of Carmen’s interests are barns and other working building facades. These weathered structures tell a story of our country’s modest and hardworking past that she hopes to highlight in her work.