~ Carolinemindscape ~

Artist Bio

I started painting at St Martin’s School of Art in the mid to late 1980’s and over the next 30 years took various detours namely working as a secondary art teacher and gaining a Masters in Art Psychotherapy in 2008. I am currently on MFA at London Met.

In between chance and intent, my work could be described as subconscious thinking but I think of it more as experiential - an experience recorded rather than a process or a preoccupation with format or technique. I am trying to achieve a descriptive space between my inner and outer realities which I ‘recognise’.

The pictorial quest to achieve this is, I think, a way to create a sense of some control in a world which seems increasingly unpredictable. Firmly rooted in gestural abstraction but with one foot in graphic linearity, I am exploring the relationship between the aesthetic and the comic without any of its figuration, narrative or noise.

The question which interests me is how much can be communicated emotionally through abstracted forms, markmaking, colour and line. And can abstract painting be humanised and meaningful to the viewer if nothing specific is intended to be communicated beyond its materialism?

These are issues I am exploring in my work, combining my love of ukiyo-e wood prints and among others, Robert Crumb, and Kevin O’Neill’s artwork for 2000AD, and abstract expressionism.

I work exclusively in acrylic paint and acrylic ink

The challenge for me is how to develop my language of markmaking and layering to describe an internal landscape of emotions and thoughts that can on some level be intuited and ‘felt’ by the viewer. The result of this process is always up for grabs.

Caroline Sharma