BIOGRAPHY
In the nineteen-seventies and - eighties, Carol Vollet Kingston designed costumes and sets for the ballets of choreographers like Alvin Ailey, Choo San Goh, Talley Beatty and Gerald Arpino, and her work has been presented at the Paris Opera and Reggio Emilio, the Singapore Dance Theater and the Sydney Opera, the Royal Swedish, the Royal Danish, at Lincoln Center in New York and the Kennedy Center in US, and theaters around the world. Then, a decade or so ago, she began to devote herself to large works and installations that include drawings and paintings, on canvas, naugahyde, and plastic RP screen, sometimes with soundtracks, photographs, electro-printing and construction. She draws every day (even on the treadmill), takes endless photographs, and experiments continually with scale and medium. Technique, she says, must seduce the viewer into looking.
Much of Carol’s work has been ironical and political; her drawing installations, “Words Spoken and Unspoken” and “Everyman” were shown in Capetown and Johannesburg, respectively, in 1999 and 2000; Some of her “Wild, Wild West” pieces were shown in London, in 2003, exposing a world of good and evil in an ambivalent culture. The four installations collectively known as the “Last Supper” series - - featuring contemporary political leaders, with ironic reference to Leonardo - - have been variously shown in the United States through the past six years. The studies from which that work developed (both drawings and paintings) are now being extended as continuing series of commissioned portraits called “Boots of Special Interest.”
Currently, Carol teaches graduate and undergraduate painting and drawing at the C.W. Post College of Long Island University and she is working on the design of a new ballet, with a genetic “Middle East” setting, for presentation in two years, with actual participation by children around the world. “Floating” and “Mapping” comprise her most recent body of work (with which she is still experimenting) and at the same time she is creating “the Blueshift” a series of domestic representational painting that invite viewer participation. “FLOATING” and “MAPPING” and “LANDING”��“Floating” and “Mapping” and “Landing” are my newest series of paintings, begun in 2006 and now quite widely shown.� On canvases of different sizes, often quite large, and with a carefully varied palette, they comprise a series of what I think of as abstract, allegorical narratives.� A narrative is a coherent story, inferring time and space; an allegory employs shapes and movement to imply something other than themselves; and abstraction suggests the energy and intention inherent in allegorical narrative. ��������� Allegoric narrative is a timeless present, unleashing something of the inchoate energy of the universe.� In a sense, my painting is the expression and the reflection of a self that is often elusive.� We seem, sometimes, to dissolve into our environment, yet remain still ourselves: rising, falling, seeing, fearing, resting. “Floating”, “Mapping”, and “Landing” (the latest series, completed in the present year) are inescapably related, although with subtly progressive differences in palette and movement.� They are also about paint itself – an expression of emotion to which viewers respond individually.� As a painter, I want my viewer to respond, and to think.� Color is major in these works:� applied wet-on-wet, with brush, combs and hand-strokes, every line or dribble - in sign-enamel or oil, gloss or matte (for life has different surfaces) - is the dialogue of a work itself that is never still, dictates change, yet never quite escapes remembrance and awe.�� � |
