BEAUTIFUL!!! x

Its very beautiful!!!

stunning Carol

Outstanding work. God bless.

Carol this art piece is as always with all your art so very beautiful, love it. hugs Jane xx

Carol, as you know, I'm just doing a few comments per gallery this week (I'm not ready to enter the world yet!), with exceptions only for those artists I missed the last 4 or 5 months (and even there, I'm just doing maybe 5). So I'll be back after the 1st for more than one image. But as you know, I can spend 30 minutes on one of your images, so you know you're getting the equivalent of several comments. As for why I chose this, it's because there are so many to choose from, so I chose the most recent, because---it was the most recent. (A fine aesthetic choice!) When I leave a comment, I always re-read, correct it, edit it, etc, so it really is a long matter. So know that I'm giving this my all. As your work deserves it...

(A lonnnnnnnng introduction. Kind of like your waits at the airport...Now:)

This has very painterly qualities, as in traditional oil or acrylic. Some watercolor too. Your paintstrokes are, as always, very vital and sensuous. But it also has the influence of alcohol inks. And maybe the Yupo contributes too---Yupo is supposed to be waterproofed, right? So I imagine that surface helps you create some of the amazing sights you create with these mixed media pieces.

What you have is a pulsing, deep painting---deep not only for the forms and caverns and convolutions taking us deep inside the flowers, but also for your deep hues, all mixed with your electric bubbling cellular profusion that shows up in all your alcohol-based pieces. I don't know the physical end of this, as I've never used alcohol based inks. But you have this interaction with the process in which you both create and follow, and you allow whole organic bubblings and effusions to take place. And you have an intuitive sense of where to let them go, and where to not let them go. They bubble up all around your subjects, and sometimes inside them---here, mainly around the flowers but not 'in' them. I assume that's the alcohol-based influence. But whatever it is, you create these wonderful swirly snail-like patterns, shell-like patterns, and bubbles, and tiny one-celled organisms, and so on. And it sets your flowers against an inner tide-pool of tiny lives and creatures and formations, all packed into the tiny enclave of those tide pools. And they surround and intersperse with your flowers, giving them a very primal background. As if the flowers grew out of a mire of primal life just going about its business forming, mingling and doing what life does, while those signature Carol flowers burst into the image with their usual depths and passionate convolutions. ("Convolution" colloquially means something negative. But aesthetically, it literally means to curl and roll together---co volute. Ie, deep rolls, curls, caverns, etc.)

All we have to do is look between the flowers: In the upper left corner, maybe 3 inches down and 2 inches in, we see these shapes, like blurbs all crowding in on each other: They could be some buds in the background: But they look like primal life forms all crowding together, between the flowers. They're in a more orange-ish hue, and you have some deep purple-reds to the left (love that hue there). And, above them---man...shell forms, swirly things that look like the hardened shells of more life forms. This kind of detail permeates your alcohol-based pieces, and they are grand. And you use different hues for them, which is also grand. Two whole palettes in the same piece, and they have such dialogue with each other.

Hope I can explain what I'm about to say: Beethoven didn't write fugues, for the most part. (If you don't know the structure of a fugue, don't worry: Just know it was a form that disappeared 30 years before Beethoven was born, and he didn't feel at home with it.) Yet, he felt called to it; and he grappled and wrestled with it all his life, until, in his final works, he wrote a number of massive fugues, huge beasts so complex and harrowing, you'd have thought his whole life was put into them. At first blush, they're terrifying and tortured. But with time, they reveal not only his most passionate outpouring, but some of his most touching; and an amazing freedom to let all those musical lines battle it out on their own.

Now: While you have many things in common with Beethoven's passion (and Bach's cosmic counterpoint and overview), your painting never feels 'tortured'. That's not one of your usual traits. (Beethoven was a major-ly tortured person, remember. That was part of why his last fugues could be tortured. And he was deaf at the time, too, which added to the torture.) But the parallel is this: Some techniques just open new strange doors. We might produce wonderful work without them---in your case, that's a no brainer, as you'd produce magnificent work if you never did an alcohol-based work in your life. But when you use alcohol, you grapple with it, listen to it, feel "ok, you win, tell me where you want to go," and so on. Its peculiar nature---like the fugue to Beethoven---allows you to go places you might not have gone without it. The result is this whole sub-category of painting that's utterly you (just like those late fugues were utterly 'Beethoven'), and you make incredibly Carol-ish works in a medium that, a little while back, you never used. You let it in, and you made masterful pieces with it.

Something with those alcohol-based inks calls you to places that only 'they' call you to. And I repeat: If you never did an alcohol-based piece in your life, you'd turn out one masterful painting after the next. But the addition of alcohol-based inks has given you a special neighborhood to create in, just like the fugue did for Beethoven, and you've totally embraced it: You make these wildly primal interactional works. The alcohol-based part intrudes, squeezes-in wherever it wants, and you seem to be the director---you give it direction. You're the choreographer. And you do it brilliantly, trusting your dancers to give their all, and knowing them well enough to let them.

Back to the colors: The colors of those bubbles/blurbs are different from the colors of your flowers. The blurbs have a life of their own. But with your innate color sense, you combine them to make a rich tapestry. Golden orange reds make a strong contrast with purples (ie, background to flowers), but also a very amber-y golden backdrop. It makes the painting that much richer.

Back to the flowers, the pulsing strokes, use of brighter purples over darker purples, oranges thrown in for accent, whites for highlight---these all make each petal a little universe of passionate strokes and expression. This could apply to a number of your flower paintings, in fact this whole comment could apply to a number of your flower paintings. (I should say, "see my comment on "Wild Orchids," with footnotes and bibliography---that sounds arrogant!) They pulse and radiate across the page. Add to that the convolutions and shadowed areas, and you have lots of hidden caverns and mysterious places. I've compared your flower painting to Van Gogh before. I've also compare it to Georgia O'Keeffe. And I could throw in Manet (though I don't know if he painted flowers), Klimt (ditto) and some others. Powerful strokes, wonderful symphonic movement between hues within a single petal. A real sense of the inner and outer movements within a petal, etc. All trademarks of your wonderful flower work.

So---see, this took a 45 minutes, and I haven't re-read the damned thing yet!---this is yet another masterful flower painting from you. With those wonderful greens, btw, on the bottom: You use greens in some of your works as bases, groundings; and the greens are often very luminous and sensual, as they are here. To say this is "typical for you" is saying a high compliment. It's masterful and passionate and it covers a whole universe. It's grand, Carol. I'll do more after the holidays. I hope the rest of yours are wonderful and free of madness! A great (and much better) 2017 to you! Great work.

Mark, thanks so much for your awesome comment and critique of this artwork.With traveling, and then being without internet for several days, I'm late seeing your comment. I truly appreciate the time and energy you put into comments. As always, you see so much in my work that not only surprises and thrills me, but also inspires me. Aside from creating itself, I don't think there is a greater gift to an artist then that of having someone really see and feel and experience a creation. This is why we all do it, and continue to do it. To communicate in ways that often can't be explained, only felt. So thank you for feeling my work in your own very unique way, and for the gift of your expression and words that you give so generously. And eloquently.

As you know I've been working on a massive project of creating some art to go with two novels I've written. And this floral was inspired by a novel that takes place on an island in the Caribbean, and the passion and color of orchid jungles and all the lush abundance of a tropical paradise. For me, the flowers are like the characters, each pulsating with their own life force, personality, and passion. And I always lose myself, or perhaps escape, into the universe of their sensual and seductive colors, shapes, and textures. And the alcohol inks allow the journey and adventure to be even wilder. The novels are love stories, so what better place to express the passion than the untamed and abundant universe of an orchid. This is one of many such florals I am creating, with unique flowers like the moonflowers that only bloom in moonlight, or the Bakula that opens at night, and the voluptuous Ylang Ylang blossoms that ooze a sensual perfume from the tree of heaven, and the blue orchid gardens filled with blue butterflies, and the groves of giant Cassia trees with blossoms cascading like waterfalls in vibrant yellows and all the colors of a sunrise.

For me, your comments are as colorful and passionate as my characters and all the flowers in my island paradise. And as inspiring. In each painting I think there is a little bit of Mark. :o)

really beautiful

Magnifico !!!