artist’s statement
carole bolsey

My paintings are “…painterly abstractions that use recognizable shapes to explore the notion of space and the phantasm of light.” *

I make color field paintings with shapes that are barns or boats, with strong light casting shadows on land, or boats with reflections on water.

The boats and barns are simple and generic, not calling attention to themselves: just there to be recognized as familiar, beautiful in their banality. It’s not important that they are a certain design of boat or barn. It is their familiar geometry, their shapes---surfaces, angles, curves, and planes--that interact with their setting, projected as shadows or distorted as reflections. They remind me of moments in space, on land or water, recollections not of a specific time or place, but of the sensations of time and place, where nearly all of the experience is forgotten, the details lost to memory. Only the powerful impression---the ‘hallucination’, as Donald Kuspit ** describes it ---remains in the mind’s eye.

I usually work in series, riffing on a few elements, improvising on an idea.

In recent years, the idea has been water. Or rather, “water.” It fascinates me and dominates all my new work.

The surface of a body of water is a plane, one with an infinite number of possible disturbances and distances. Each moment the surface produces a different image, a different relationship to what it reflects.

Water reveals its depths, its colors and tonalities in the way it refracts and alters light, revealing and obscuring fragments of pure image---dancing and shifting---in an interplay of the real and the imagined, appearance and disappearance.

Surface reflections are images of the concrete world—the sky, the shore, a boat or barn---intermixed with the patterns and shifting elements at play in the water: ripples, swells, the physical and the imaginary; the solid object and its phantasm; the lasting and the momentary.

The objects are there to give scale and perspective to the painting, to create a place on the water or the plane of land. Perspective tells us where we are, how near or far, above or below the horizon, whether our eye-level is down at the waterline or way above, poised in mid-air. Perspective is a mind game that locates us, pointing to our own place in the world, on the water, on the land, and in between: places only the mind can reach.

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* “[Bolsey’s paintings] are grand painterly abstractions that use recognizable shapes to explore the notion of space and the phantasm of light.”

Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe, “Seeing the light on her landscapes, brilliantly”, Nov. 18, 1999

** “Bolsey’s greatest achievement is to recover the state of reverie in which every appearance becomes an esthetic hallucination…” ‘it reaches a “desert” in which nothing can be perceived but feeling’ ” Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World 1927” ”

Donald Kuspit, Art Critic ,New York, “In the Desert of the Mind: Carole Bolsey’s Construction of Feeling,” exhibition catalogue, The New Gallery, University of Miami