top of page
Nicole Carroll
Nicole Carroll is originally from Mentor, Ohio and currently based in Cleveland, Ohio. She received a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree in Painting and an emphasis in Printmaking at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the Spring of 2023. She currently works with primarily oil paint on wooden panel, as well as print methods such as acid etch, drypoint, lithography, and screen printing. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions, most recently being a part of a group show at the Audrey & Harvey Feinberg Art Gallery.
Artist Statement
I am interested in how people perceive and try to make sense of an image, particularly when a loss or an abundance of information is present. To explore this, I create oil paintings that have undergone various levels of distortion, simplifying an original source into two primary painting styles, one focused on amplifying the color and mark making, and one focused on the color palettes of its previous painting. Both bodies of work operate in different ways, giving the viewer two understandings of the same source.
Growing up hearing impaired, I have navigated the world moving from noise and chaos into recognizable knowledge when attempting to understand what others are saying in day to day life. As someone with cochlear implants, I move back and forth between hearing and not hearing. As I listen to other people, I can misunderstand them, making conversations a challenge. I am using my experiences to generate these works, and using abstraction to create these different levels of imagery that get more and more distorted. This distortion calls attention to the idea that we are never getting the full picture.
I saturate the colors and use palette knives to further distort the painting from its source. I apply thick paint to the surface of my substrates, and mark making then intensify the shapes and lines within the image. The colors in the work talk to each other, as the color palettes from the previous work gets translated into these color swatch paintings, acting as a new understanding of the source image. Color and shape bring associations to mind, allowing the viewer different avenues to make sense of the work. Overall, the size of the paintings evoke the viewer to come close to view the tactility of the marks and the colors packed within one section of the piece.
This work calls attention to the nature of human perception, and how personal associations lead us to make different meanings when a loss or an abundance of information is present. These two modes of paintings act as a visual representation of viewing the same thing in two different ways. The broken and distorted aspect to the work acts as a metaphor that we are never getting the full picture in our daily lives.
bottom of page