ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings are not so much conceptually driven as they are process driven. As an intuitive painter, my work is always influenced by events in the world around me as well as impacted by the emotional state through which the creation of artwork is filtered. Struggling to find my way after my Mom’s passing last May, I was terribly sad and thoroughly exhausted. It seemed impossible to muster up any passion, desire or energy for making art. Eventually I did get back into my studio and I found myself painting these meandering, curving lines. Doing so soothed me. The wavy lines began to interest me and making them began to satisfy me and after a bit, the pattern became a part of the process. I liked the feeling of trailing along to see where the line wanted to go. That kept me working in my studio. After the first two or three paintings, I laid in more complex layers, some of which were scraped back in order to leave a more compelling footprint echo for the surface line. These paintings are nascent beginnings and I feel compelled to make more and see what else may find a way into them.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Carol Bivins is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work can be found in private collections across the U.S. and in the United Kingdom. Growing up in a small midwestern town, she moved to New York and began pursuing her artistic career. After spending many years living in NYC and Los Angeles and working in theater, television and appearing in such films as Defending Your Life and Groundhog Day, she moved to the Southwest. Seeking a creative outlet, Carol turned to an old hobby, ceramics. Dissatisfaction with glazing results propelled her to investigate drawing and painting and there was no turning back.
Looking for new energy, adventure and inspiration, she relocated to Colorado in 2017. Since that time, Carol’s artwork has been juried into exhibitions from coast to coast and appeared in Artsy Magazine as part of the Minimalism Exhibition at ShockBoxx Gallery in CA and was included in the Los Angeles exhibition “photoLA 2020,” a collection of portraits of LA Artists and Others by fine art photographer Jeffrey Sklan. In 2021 she was featured in VoyageLA, an online arts and culture publication in Los Angeles. For Carol, painting serves as a means of wrestling with and expressing her emotional reactions to the world at large. With the dynamism of a colorist, her process-driven, intuitively developed abstract works investigate both the play and the tension created by marks, gesture, line and the cacophony of color as they compete for pride of place on the canvas.
© Carol Bivins