Cole Carothers' Paintings

Cole Carother's paintings have two principle features that attract notice. There is the theme of the artist's experience in the studio and the Flemish finish fetish that his work explores. Not Vermeer exactly, because there are no people posing in Carothers' paintings, but here is that obsession with light and the effects it can create that was pioneered in fifteenth century Flanders and brought to perfection in still life and interiors of the Dutch seventeenth century.

"Cat's Away" 2002 by Cole Carothers

The question then is to what extent does Carothers' want these kinds of pictorial analogies to exist in a viewer's mind? We can say that there are post-modern appropriations of historical practice in his work and then go ahead to notice what is definitively modern about the paintings, the segmented canvases and panels with which they are composed. These are seemingly detachable elements that must have been painted independently and then assembled to form a larger, more modern scale work. Noticing next how the seams, or intersections of the smaller panels with the whole, make an actual linear structure, not just a theoretical one, pushes a viewer more firmly into a conceptual post-modern way of thinking.

The Flemish painter had a similar challenge when asked to carry a scene through the major and minor panels of a polyptych altarpiece. Then the action of the holy figures with saints and donors carried the message. Later Dutch artists like Vermeer didn't have to bother much with saints in reformist 17th century Holland. His studio environments convey a way of working and living that was orderly and compressed latent meanings into every object. Carothers' chooses to provide visual drama with much more mundane studio objects. Their familiarity is reassuring to us although the stability of the planes in some of these interiors definitely is not. Objects are threatening to fall...and is that a floor or a wall over there?

Instead of intense clarity of representation, what today we call photographic realism, Carothers' filters the light in his studio, the light on his objects even the light on the landscapes glimpsed through a window. This filtering leaves everything distinct, but seen in a light that is wholly his invention. This light corresponds well with some of the perspective illusions that give a mysterious unease to what the viewer understands of the space. Carothers' invites us into his working environment by stressing the mental activity that goes on there.

Cole Carothers

Carothers' Reply

It may be difficult for my work to remain in the viewer's mind. I do hope that the viewing experience does remain. And to that end, I try to paint an image that has compelling reasons to do this. In particular, I try to give a life to my surfaces just as they were lively when painting them. There are vestiges of underpainting, a variety of tools and manipulations that invigorate the paint with marks, layers, blending, texture and resonant luminosity. The process of painting is really important and I choose to leave certain indecisive moments in the work where they add something to the end result. In this way, I think it's like blazing a trail for others to follow.

You mentioned, "post-modern appropriations." I assume you mean reference to other artists before me. I agree that there is much influence and appreciation for the "painting tradition" and certainly there are artists to whom I owe a particular debt, but part of my history appropriation is really about my own history. That is, I may work an older painting into a new one. Gregory Gillespie did much the same by inserting, adding or cutting panels as a means towards new ones. And in our time, history, like the news is a split-second reality. So, I make use of narrow time frames in my work as well as larger ones. This adds to the immediacy or urgency in my painting as work and I think it becomes vital to the "finished" piece.

Regarding the assemblage of panels, it has a lot to do with my lack of studies before I paint. It's another form of on-the-job editing. I might add panels to increase the spatial volume I'm working with. Philip Guston once remarked that his expressionistic paintings were desperate attempts to reach the outer edges of his canvas and I work in somewhat of the reverse. I'm really bound to the outer edges of my panels and always struggling to fill inwards. This might be a metaphor for trying to find myself by painting, the "outside" when really my subject is invention from my mind rather than replication of existing reality.

I think at times I'm painting in circles. I used to say that I was painting images that I hoped viewers would think really existed like a landscape of the city or a still life set-up or something. While I do paint from looking at some actual things, rarely are they entirely true to a source. Now I realize that what is true in my painting is the effort and it's a composite of looking everywhere and bringing it all to the panel at different times. So, it doesn't always connect perfectly as one might hope. Perhaps a good analogy would be the way a film editor makes a movie, only I leave a lot of the cuttings in the picture rather than on the floor. I guess it's a continuum.