Carole Malcolm
Carole Malcolm is an Ontario-based painter from New Brunswick. Her realistic and contemporary paintings recreate impressions and atmospheres from her childhood and expeditions. The seashores and undergrowth depicted in her paintings invite calm, escape and travel.
Carole Malcolm - An invitation to travel and dream
Carole Malcolm was born in 1958 in Dieppe, a small town on the outskirts of Moncton, New Brunswick. She now lives in Oxford Station, Ontario.
Background and career
Carole has been drawing and painting since early childhood. While life has led her in other directions, including a military career, her true calling as an artist has always been close to her heart. Essentially self-taught, she has been devoting herself full-time to her art since 1995.
Work and art
Years after leaving her hometown, she continues to revisit her childhood haunts, this time as an artist. They have become some of her greatest sources of inspiration. Her memories continue to influence her work, along with the process of gathering reference material and sketching on location before creating the final paintings in her studio.
She is fascinated by the ever-changing spectacle of the sea. She lingers on the waves as they are absorbed and reborn over and over again. This never-ending story, with its soothing rhythm, has become a permanent source of inspiration for her. The same is true for her painted landscapes of sun-dappled forest and undergrowth. She seeks to capture not only the moment, but eternity, through the movements of the waves and the sun’s progress through the trees. Her goal is to capture the light and invite the viewer to share a pause in everyday things and the memories that it triggers in their own selves.
Her work has evolved out of her continued interest in the natural landscape. She spent years working in watercolour before discovering fluid acrylics. The addition of a palette knife to her toolbox allows her to add more texture than ever before. She prepares her canvas with several coats of gesso and modeling paste to build up a textured painting surface. After wetting the canvas, many washes of colour are applied by pouring, spattering, rubbing and dry brushing as she progresses toward completion of the painting. Lines, colours and reliefs subtly intertwine in her compositions, creating a powerful gestural impression. Above all, she enjoys working where not every step is planned and controlled, exploring the impression of a landscape.
“I love that it's impossible to predict the exact outcome since the paint will find the crevices in the textured canvas as it's drying and produce something different each time."
As a romantic construction of simple elements, Carole Malcolm’s work reveals an artist who is in tune with her subject, for whom nature is a vast reserve of energy, escape and peace.
Carole Malcolm is represented by the Au P'tit Bonheur Art Gallery since May 2016.
