Working from her Northwest England studio, international contemporary artist Carla Raads creates paintings that carry the salt air and emotional weight of coastlines around the world. Born on South Africa's dramatic Eastern Cape coast, she brings the memory of those powerful seascapes into dialogue with her current English landscape and the diverse shores she encounters through travel, exploring what it means to carry multiple places within a single artistic vision.

Raads' artistic foundation includes fine art and photography studies, along with a meaningful apprenticeship under Philippe Aird of Hulme, connecting her to the artistic legacy of L.S. Lowry. Yet her most defining moment came when she abandoned brushes entirely and began painting seascapes with her hands. What started as an instinctive need to feel the paint became her signature approach—a direct, visceral connection between artist and canvas that creates work of striking emotional intensity.