Caroline James

I was born in 1962 in Calgary Alberta which makes me 48 years old. Whew,….when I was a child I thought people like me were pretty close to dead…..;)….Thank god 48 is the new 28,….or something like that. Anyway, when I was that little kid in Calgary I spent an inordinate amount of time drawing, making all kinds of crafts, and rearranging spaces. Even back then I was fascinated by composition , by the effect of various combinations of lines and shapes and colors in a given volume of space. I spent hours “redecorating” my room, moving things around, placing my meager possessions and furniture in different arrangements. When I got a little older I started re-arranging the whole house. Fortunately no one seemed to mind.

This obsession with composition and space did not translate into a career in interior décor but rather the two dimensional surfaces I’ve been obsessively creating since 1987. Throughout my career I’ve used a variety of materials from crayon on newsprint to oil on linen on surfaces of wood and paper and canvas that have ranged from 8’ x 12’ to 8” x 12”.

I competed my undergraduate work in stages starting at Mount Royal College in Calgary. In 1987 I moved Victoria, B.C. with the intention of obtaining a degree in Biology. I never considered art making as a serious career option until I took an evening art class as an elective. I switched programs the next semester and the rest as they say is “Herstory”.

Completeing the program at Camosun with a major in painting, I then moved on to the University of Victoria studying with Linda Gammon, Elbeth Pratt and Robert Youds among other well respected faculty and graduated in 1994 with distinction. At that time I was deeply involved in an investigation of an expressive, painterly figurative style and personal autobiographical narrative as content. These small (2’ x 3’) paintings dealt with notions of power, identity, sexuality, and relationship as reflected in images of children. The creation of this body of work resulted in my first professional solo exhibition at Xchanges Gallery in Victoria, B.C. in 1996.

After working and painting for several years I applied to several graduate programs and was subsequently offered a full teaching scholarship at the University of Saskatchewan in the Master if Fine Arts Program.My intention in the beginning of grad school was to continue was to continue with my familiar style and concept but in a more objective and less autobiographical vein. This intention and most of what I thought I knew about painting almost immediately fell apart and I found myself spening the first year of my MFA trying to find a new foot hold in a medium that suddenly felt completely unknown to me.

My frustration (and anxiety!) led to a period of intensive research and a fascination with the history, theories and practices of modernist painting. The work that I began to undertake was a result a melding of all manner of both modern and post-modern philosophical notions and an ongoing obsession with notions of the “authentic mark/image”, specifically as it related to automatism. Ironically where before I found myself drawn to images of children, I now found myself entranced by the inherent beauty and power of the marks and images that they create particularly in pre-verbal developmental stages of seemingly primal “Automatic” graphic communications.

This obsession resulted in a powerful body of work of large abstract oil and mixed media paintings. That work garnered me my first professional gallery representation that same year when I moved back to Victoria in 2000 and the rest has been a bit of a blur. I started teaching Free Expression Painting workshops in 2002 and that has been an amazingly valuable part of my life, an opportunity to give back some of whats been given to me that never fails to humble me. I am deeply honoured by and grateful for the trust my students give me each and everytime I teach.

While the work has continuously changed and evolve along with my own changes and personal growth certain things remain constant. The process is ALWAYS purely intuitive and there are no mediums excluded from the vast possibilities of that process. When a story/body of work completes it self there is always a resting period that I’ve learned to respect it as a place to wait quietly for the next creative impulse to reveal itself.

I ‘ve been living on Hornby Island for 8 years now. Two years ago I met the love of my life Deb, and we bought a home together here that we are currently renovating together. We have two black labs named Stella and Lola whom I walk on the beach most mornings before heading off to the studio.