Carol Duchamp: Dance Me to the End of Time

April 22, 2023 - June 23, 2023

-Artist Reception: April 22, 3-5 PM (no registration necessary)-

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My approach as an intuitive painter highlights the freedom and magic of unplanned process. Colors mingle and transform in a wordless unfolding of momentary experience. A synergistic dance between body, mind, spirit, water, pigment, and paper takes place.

Each painting is a unique improvisation honoring the mystery of being that lies at the heart of creativity and consciousness. Though indeterminacy and chance play a role; craft and faith in the co-arising outcome are ever present.

I fell in love with color as a child free to roam and witness mother nature’s exquisite palette. At summer camp, in a state of childlike wonder and enhanced perception, I once beheld the iridescent blue of a racer snake against the green of grass. Color sidled up against color. The play of color in nature is dynamic, similar to the blending of pigment directly on pre-soaked paper.

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Artist Arthur Okamura called my paintings “aesthetic explorations of color, space, and fluidity.” Others have highlighted my fluid abstract compositions as “cosmic, flowing and full of light.”

The feeling tone expressed is graced with meaning and the promise of intimacy with what is—raw emotion, mind state, kinesthetic energy, sense memory and dream. I take the invisible raw materials of life, transform and interpret them.

Browse a book of Carol’s paintings or find out more about Carol on her website.

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Retrospective 1983-2023

“Known for her watercolor paintings, artist Carol Duchamp utilizes watercolor technique with fluid acrylics in saturated colors worked wet into wet rag paper. Her work is like a jazz riff on a melody of color that starts with a single long stroke. Sensitive to the energy of the moment, she follows the cues of the colors’ movements with spontaneity. Abstract expressionism hasn’t been this happy since Sam Francis!”

—Claudia Chapline

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Carol Duchamp            

Carol was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and raised in southern Ohio. She migrated to Berkeley, California, via France and New York City and has lived in Bolinas, California, since 1980. She holds a BA in French Language and Literature, and an MA in Sociology from the University of Strasbourg, France. Carol was an MA student in Transformative Arts as part of the Arts & Consciousness program at JFKU in Berkeley.As founder and director of Art Trek, Carol taught and led international travel study painting classes, many in collaboration with UCSC Extension. Art Treks to France, Italy, French Polynesia, Bali & Java, Indonesia, and the American Southwest were among her specialties. Major solo exhibitions of her vivid watercolor and fluid acrylic works on paper include INTIMATIONS at IONS EarthRise Gallery in Petaluma, and SUBJECTIVITIES at Commonweal Gallery in Bolinas. Five of her paintings are currently on view through April 18, 2023, at Kim Eagles-Smith Gallery in Mill Valley.            

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