about caroline
My primary orientation, and the way I ground myself in the world, has always been through beauty. Even before I could represent anything beautiful, beauty was my place of refuge. When I was young and feeling unsafe, or unheard, or afraid, I would scan my environment for what was lovely there—the way the light fell on a wall, the curve of a houseplant’s leaves—and my whole nervous system would soften as I became beauty’s witness. Every good healer I’ve had as I’ve processed trauma has brought me back to beauty, knowing it’s a place of trust for me. My visual awareness is always what I’ve perceived before anything else: it precedes my body, it precedes my thoughts. It’s the sense organ in me that’s most alive. So early on, I was drawn to cultivate a practice of representing the visual beauty in front of me as the most natural way of honoring how I connect with the world.
Because I was so vision-directed, I wasn’t very embodied when I was young. Sometime in my late twenties my best friend said to me: “You have to figure out what your practice is. You have to decide what you’re going to do every day that brings you into your body and awakens your awareness. You’re flailing because you’re not fully alive in your own being.” It was a life-changing reflection. I tried yoga as a practice. I tried writing. I tried many things to encourage embodiment, and the only thing I loved enough to return to as a daily practice was art. Art reintroduced me to my body.
I forgot about the embodiment piece in art school. I come from an academic family with perfectionist drives, and that caused me a lot of suffering. I arrived with preconceived notions about the way art should look, and I was taught color theory and the mathematical ratios of picture planes. The practices were formal and theory-based, and I got stuck in “getting it right.” One day a friend asked (I’ve been blessed in this life with wise friends): “Why are you trying to reproduce exactly what you see?” The question shot through my body, waking up every cell. I suddenly understood that I could draw from my body—the energies and colors that moved through me as I stood witness to beauty. Beauty became a collaboration between myself and what beckons me in the world. Ultimately what emerges now is the same realist style, but the process is somatic and intuitive. When I stopped privileging eyesight and the brain in my process, I began drawing better than I’d ever have been able to.
My body now takes shapes when I paint. I rock back-and-forth as I’m dipping my brush; I trace wide circles with my arms in the air. I’m on my feet, looking at the paper from a series of angles and calling up the next color. I say “calling up” because it’s visceral, an internal spiral I’m cultivating. When I learned to shade in art school I was told: “Start with the darkest dark and move gradually toward what’s lighter.” And yes, that’s one way of going about it. But if I ask my body about shading, a color rises up from my feet through my spinal cord. I’ll ask it: “What color next? What shape next?” The answer comes back as a somatic word: warmer, cooler, smaller, longer, tighter. “Go to the bottom of the canvas and draw a circle,” it’ll say. I’ll let the color fragment until my body says, with clarity: “Blue, and then orange, to golden that light.” I keep moving to keep cultivating the spiral. And words do come. But I’m not intellectually thinking about it at all.
I’ve spent years immersing myself in Renaissance paintings. Initially there was no theory of shading from left to right, dark to light. Initially there was no Golden Ratio that dictated the width-to-height proportion of a picture plane and where the key focal points of an image should be. After a while someone came along and created a theory, a method for these things. But I’m certain the earliest painters taught themselves to paint by listening to their bodies. Maybe theirs weren’t spirals like mine; maybe words didn’t rise up from their spines. But surely there was something somatic there, a tuning-in to the harmonics of the natural world. Our brains are hard-wired to create images that use the Golden Ratio because our cellular bodies grow according to it. So when my body tells me to take a painting off-center because it has more power that way, I trust it. Theories and methods are just retrospective affirmations of my body’s intuitions. I can look at the method and say, “That’s what I’ve been doing. No wonder it works.”
Picasso once said: “Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.” Cubism was ultimately an exploration of movement in the body, transferring emotions onto the canvas in order to empty the body back into stillness. That feels like the most aligned description of my experience of creating. Whenever I decide I have a method, my art practice becomes stiff. I’d even go so far as to say—though you won’t read this anywhere—that those lines in Picasso, in Cubism, are energies. A face askew is the distortion of a thought or an emotion. That’s how I experience Picasso’s lines, and it's why his horrific paintings are so horrific: I can feel the suffering in them. There’s a lot to struggle with when it comes to Picasso, but he brought so much consciousness to his work within the social constructs of his time and place. I have so much reverence for his art.
A friend of mine recently said: “Tell me about mistakes in art.” And I said: “The mistakes are where a piece really becomes alive, because that spot is now suffused with the emotions of ‘having gotten it wrong’ or ‘having it not come out as expected.’” That’s when a piece becomes beautiful. It also alters the notion of what a mistake is: as soon as you extract the method, the only “mistake” you can make is forgetting to tune into your body, leaving yourself.