When I was a child, I saw the world through art and music. On a high school history assignment, I'd hurry through the report and spend hours laboring over the cover illustration. Those covers, I think, earned my grades. The flute carried me through the storms of adolescence. I went off to college, and as I contemplated a career, I believed that eventually I would have to choose between music and art.
At Sarah Lawrence College, my first and only art class was with a teacher who rigorously explored the abstract properties of color and composition. It was - he was - dry and difficult. By the end of the semester I concluded, and he concurred, that I had a facile hand but lacked an artist's mind. At eighteen years of age, I lay down my pencil and brush.
The heavens opened for me in July 2003. A good friend invited me to join an amateur watercolor workshop with painter Jane Goldman. I was reluctant to join at first, still believing I had no artistic ability. But when I first squeezed pigments from their tubes onto my plastic palette, tears came to my eyes. Then, when I dipped my wet brush into paint and swirled forms on the white paper, I felt relief, as if I were finally coming home. By the end of the week I knew I had to paint. Since that summer, I've drawn or painted nearly every day in my studio, and in classes and workshops with Tom Ouellette, Jane Goldman, Judi Betts, Nita Engle, Amy Wynne Derry, John Salminen, Mel Stabin, and others.
People, especially their connections, their uniqueness, and their preciousness pull me to tell their stories. The struggle to capture the essence and character of the persons emerging under my hand evokes the complexity and uncertainty of our relationships with each other. Sometimes I get it right; sometimes I’m not quite there. Currently, I am painting an African series, inspired by images from our years in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso in the 1960's and of our extended African family. My most recent painting of the morning after the election of Barak Obama to the Presidency of the United States tells an even broader human story. These human connections move me profoundly. My hope is that through my paintings, others will share these connections with me.
I work in both oil and watercolor, and also include collage in more abstract images. I began my artistic renaissance with watercolor, and it remains a medium that I find especially expressive. Watercolor allows both transparency and intensity. Water moves soluble pigments in ways that can never be fully predicted or controlled. We struggle together, the painting and I, and in the process, we are always pulled into unexplored territory. Oil provides different challenges and opportunities. There is a richness and controllability that lends itself to subjects with great emotional weight.
Whatever the medium, the reward, if I get it right, is the sense that the completed work translates form, value and color into an image that tells a story that will communication something I believe is essential, while delighting and exciting the eye.
I returned to art by opening a door to accommodate a friend. I will be forever grateful that in the world on the other side of this portal, I heard once more the only language that came to me naturally as a child. To speak this language thoughtfully and well has become the motive of every day in this new career.
Contact Carolyn or visit her artwork page to view examples of her work.