Combustion
Oil on canvas
24 x 36 x 1.5
$900
Born in Herefordshire, England, Caroline Chilton has lived in Mesa, Arizona for the past forty years, after a short time living in London, New York City and San Francisco. Caroline graduated from ASU with her Bachelors, Masters, and Doctorate degrees in Education, but since raising a family and retiring as a school principal, she has been able to follow her lifelong love of art. She has taken over thirty semester hours of art classes taught by excellent teachers at Mesa Community College, including art history, drawing, life drawing, painting with watercolors, acrylics and oil, photography, digital art, color theory, and elements of design. Her paintings were twice placed in the MCC Art Gallery show, and she has previously exhibited with the Arizona Arts Guild and the Mesa Artists League. Caroline’s current paintings capture and embody her lifelong passion for art, discovered in museums, galleries, and books, and the continuous drawing and playing with making art throughout her life. She loves to experiment with line, shape, and color, and she sketches and paints almost daily. Her current body of work, consisting of abstract watercolor and oil paintings, can be found on her website: Carolinechiltonart.com, Instagram/carolinechiltonsart and Facebook.com/Carolinechiltonart.
Although I enjoy painting all forms, including still life, botanicals, and landscapes, I have always been drawn to abstraction. I have memories of the awe and strong emotions felt when first seeing many famous abstract paintings at museums in London, Paris, Berlin, New York and San Francisco. I have always been inspired by the paintings of Kandinsky, and significantly he is quoted as saying, “The more frightening the world becomes … the more art becomes abstract.” During the Covid19 lockdown, each day I created an ink abstract design which I would later enlarge and paint using color palettes depending upon my mood and feelings. My focus on abstract painting had begun. In oil or watercolor, my paintings consist of overlapping forms and lines, creating geometric, intersecting shapes, using a limited number of compatible or contrasting colors. I attempt to create a detailed, logical, but organic, flow in the structure of the design to provide a sense of rhythm, balance, harmony, and depth. The mood and emotion in the overall compositions evolve intuitively and reflect personal feelings, experiences, and events prior to or at the time of the painting. My goal is to visually express these emotions in ways that will resonate with the viewer.