Sunshine, Happiness, & Joy

Paintings by Carol John

June 17-August 5

The Do Good Fund Gallery

Dynamic, colorful, chaotic, contemplative.

The abstract world that painter Carol John creates on canvas in a daily practice, forces, in the form of paint, shapes, color and movement, spatial arrangements to suggest narratives we can know and not know at the same time. Her abstractions both resist reflecting physical realities and embrace suggested alternatives and impossible ones. By default, as the human mind seeks understanding and sense of what’s encountered, the viewer is led astray and back to the unbending reality of fiction.

Some of the recent paintings presented here, made with a clear horizontal or vertical line, suggest dual suns or moons setting or rising over land or water, or worlds emerging from the cosmos, or fertilized eggs coming into being. We are never really sure, which is the freedom and beauty of her work. However, it is clearly translated in these paintings that something momentous is happening, or has happened, as a grand scale is implied by the finesse and small size of the dots used to form these shapes on a generous canvas. The mind can float and be awestruck, or made aware that a new world is forming, or has been discovered. But it is big, whatever is implied or however it is taken, as the message is we will never be the same.

The message also comes with sunshine, happiness and joy. The painting as object sits happily in any context, radiating out beams of color, complex geometry, fascinating arrangements and a peace within the elements. This duality is not a fight that Carol John is having, rather this is the tension within her work that is one of the generators for it. The dialogue is an acknowledgment of world events, rendered with form both cheerful and destructive, a darkness rendered with light.

-Carl Martin, Athens GA