A self portrait of Beth with many of her duck paintings in her studio.
Beth Carmella is an artist of many mediums. Her years of study include Montgomery College, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and the University of Maryland where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree for studio art. Beth is primarily a painter and photographer, but she also experiments with filmmaking and sculpture.
The primary subjects of her paintings are rubber ducks surrounded in a sea of abstracted paint. She emphasizes color and texture into her paintings to create depth and dimension. She prefers her paintings to focus on a connection with the viewer allowing the viewer to develop their own interpretation of each piece. In her photographic art, she often experiments with the perspective of self and identity, sometimes incorporating aspects of feminist and social issues. In her photographic works, Beth has also experimented with self portraits. She identifies her rubber duck paintings to be another form of self portrait.
Beth loves to incorporate contrast and color to intensify the subjects in both her paintings and her photographic work. In her paintings, she purposefully magnifies the emotion of the work by intentionally layering different pigments throughout each piece. By layering color, she incorporates movement and whimsy, aiming to have the subject seem stopped in motion to portray the movement that went into the work itself. In her photographic work, she expresses emotion by magnifying the hues to enhance the natural tone of the subjects within her images.
After constantly being referred to as “duck lady, “ she took on the name “Thee Duck Lady” as a play on words referring to the old english "I" as to say, "I duck Lady," to take ownership of her title as an artist and the work she produces.