<————— Back to Press Page

Carol Rowan: New Horizons (exhibition catalog), Vose Gallery, Boston, Mass., 2007

Click here to download the New Horizons exhibition catalog in PDF form

Artist interview with Marcia L. Vose

This exhibition marks a change in direction for your work. After working in graphite for over 20 years, you are now working in oil as well. Why the change? 

I will always love making drawings, but I felt that I had grown as much as I could in the medium. I needed new challenges. Back in Maryland several years ago, I found myself drawing and capturing the spirit of people’s beloved dogs. Then I started to draw horses. After realizing that the glorious muted gray / brown / yellowish silver of a Weimaraner’s coat was impossible to capture with graphite, I knew I had to paint as seriously as I had drawn, so I took out my smallest brushes, beginning with the same size as my pencils, as this was all that I was comfortable with. AFter I painted “Simon, Son of Spook,” (image), capturing the light particles on each hair over every vein and muscle, I realized I was in fact painting landscapes. I had enough courage after this to immediately launch a painting expedition to Maine. First I painted “Long Island, Maine,” (image) and “Deer Isle, Maine (image) came after this, followed by a pair of two whippet commissions. The landscapes I saw in the dogs’ coats translated into overgrown fields in the wilds of Maine, early summer colorful grass, and water of the Penobscot Bay. Painting has become a whole new beginning. The painstaking process of learning color was overwhelming at times, but I feel that I have gained mastery and am ready to present paintings that I am very proud of -- and I am my toughest critic!” 

MV: What made you become an artist? 

From quite early on in my childhood, my hand loved the touch of pencil to paper. I was connected to something I couldn’t understand. Art was a great unknown to me and remains that way today. I do not have a choice in being an artist. I can’t explain how deep the spark is in me. It has always been there. 

Which artists have given you inspiration over the years? 

My favorite place to go as a teenager was to one of the museums in New Haven, to sit in the Le Corbusier chair and stare endlessly into a huge Jackson Pollock painting. It was the pace of his work, the energy and chaos, that spoke to me. Then began my regular visitations to the Vermeers at the Met, where I marveled at his technical mastery and way with light. After graduating from Pratt Institute in 2983, I lived in Soho and was a natural part of the downtown scene. I was an abstract painter in a similar style as AL Held, and during the 80s I spent hours sitting in front of his paintings at the Emmerich Gallery. His work gave me direction during that decade more than anyone else, providing structure in my search for finding my own voice. 

Chuck Close’s portraits also thrilled me. From a distance or up very close they look abstract and don’t make sense, until the viewer finds the focal point. George Tooker’s drawings completely took me in. His work spoke the language of graphite. He was an artist closely watching graphite shine as it caught the tooth of paper, too. 

Now, thirty years later, I find deep peace in front of a Bierstadt and am awed by the work of Frederick Church and Thomas Cole. And as I paint more and more, I am reminded of the importance of Josef Albers’ teaching about color field work in the 70s at Yale: colors change when juxtaposed against each other. Blue painted next to green, for example, looks entirely different from blue painted next to red. 

How did you get your start as a professional artist? 

I originally made drawings after I left Pratt because I didn’t have any money for anything besides pencils and paper. My favorite place to go while in NYC from 1980 to 1987 was the paper room at New York Central Art Supply on 3rd Avenue. It was like a sanctuary for me. [I have used only Derwent pencils and Arches paper for the last 25 years!] 

With so many influences in the city, I gradually lost my focus and left New York in 1988. When I landed on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where I have worked full time as an artist since 1989, I decided to begin assembling a serious portfolio, filled at first with drawings of buildings of the East Coast. Drawing buildings seemed a good place to start putting abstract ideas into a structured form. I copied them, I took off some of their pollution, I changed the light and focus of them. I began to understand how pencils, combined with my own spirit, could transform a photograph into a painting. Graphite gave the bulk of buildings a feminine touch. It was an anchor, a place where I could begin to emerge as an artist. Once I started, drawings seemed to be all I needed to do.  I drew for 8 hours or more every day for years. I rarely took a day off from working between 1991 and 1995. Some of the most enlightened work, in my opinion, from this period was of old structures. It was the special light of Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore that told me to look for old more and more, and I continued to paint old structures. 

How was your work received? 

People along my path have seen or given me faith in my work. They are usually at the corners of my transitions. One person has led my eyes to another, my work from one subject to the next. The well known collector, Philip Desind, of Capricorn Gallery in Maryland, bought a piece of mine in the early nineties, put my work into a group show, and also showed me all of the other drawings in his gallery. He has an extensive drawing collection that inspired me. 

Ivan Karp of OK Harris gallery included my work in group shows for a year or so before I was offered a solo show, which opened in 1993. 

1996 I went to California looking for new material, mainly buildings still, and I also fell in love with the Southern California light. I stayed for the better part of a year. During 1996 and 1997 I travelled to Europe several times and was overwhelmed with stimulation from the even older Italian and English architecture. Hollis Taggart in New York City offered me a show of these Italian and English drawings in early 1997 for the fall of 1998. The show was announced three weeks in a row in little bold type in the New York Times, which definitely a ray of hope on the career front. Five large drawings sold. 

Anyone who has gone through their forties knows that this decade in life brings a lot of reflection and soul searching. What has been your experience? 

In May of 2006 a few things happened in my life that got me up out of my studio into thinking about showing again. My paintings of animals had become so popular that I started selling prints of them and soon built a thriving business. Unfortunately I had almost no time to paint and raw and spent most of my time in the office. Even though I enjoyed the financial security, I realized that the act of painting and drawing made me truly happy. I took a much needed break from the creative confinement of my studio to go out into the landscape of dry, dusty, airy, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. This trip solidified again that to have one’s creative mind sparked and spurred is crucial to the creative process and is one of life’s most compelling moments. 

Owl’s House, a painting I have not started yet, was the first visual explosion I had on this trip many miles north of Grace, Idaho. It will be a painting of an abandoned miner’s house, with a Great Horned Owl inside waiting patiently for me to see it. Near Lander, Wyoming (p. 12) was the first western landscape I painted from this trip followed by Lander River House (p. 12). I plan on doing a few paintings from the pristine Wind River area in Wyoming as well and hope to capture the colors of the dry greenish landscape. It stirred my soul. I have almost abandoned my print business.           

What keeps you going? 

Even though I travel to new places for inspiration, when I am in my studio, I crave solitude. I enjoy life on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where my studio overlooks the Wye River, and I love the peace of the country more and more every day. As far as my work is concerned, the most satisfying part lies in the pace and rhythm of the detail-making in either a drawing or a painting that keeps me focused. It is seeing the light and darkness of an image come to life in its final form which keeps me seeking.

Usually I build the scene and end up with the details. At other times I start with the detail and wait for the thousands of brushstrokes to build the scene. Detail for me is the meditation of my work; it’s soothing, the groove I look for and tend to find day after day, year after year as I paint and draw. The work itself has now become a form of meditation.       

###