We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Carole Jolly a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Carole, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

When I was in elementary school, my Mom’s best friend, who was an artist, invited me to take classes with her. I loved it, mainly because she was such a nurturing giving patient person and I was needing that in my life. It sparked a lifelong devotion to painting and creativity. But it was always a sideline as I pursued a career in international development then counseling.

One day about five years ago, a friend and I were talking about what we would do with our lives if we were starting again. I knew that I would be an artist. The next morning I woke up with the thought “I’m not dead yet!” I can still pursue this with more intention and direction. That lead to art being my current life’s focus.

Carole, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am an oil painter who works mainly with a palette knife. I’m particularly drawn to using color and light value to create images of people, landscapes, objects and abstracts. I have sold my work individually and in galleries in North Carolina and Arizona.

I am often asked how I decide what to paint and what I envision or want to convey when I start. Art doesn’t feel like deciding anything. I see something I love, something catches my eye and I start to paint. I go to where I’m drawn. It then paints itself and becomes something new through that process while still being connected to that original inspiration. I’m not an intellectual painter. I don’t have a lot of thought about why I do what I do, why I decided to do this and not that. I do it because I love it, it feeds me and I feel great.

The creative process is more about starting with a moment of interest and being there to see what it has to say. Creativity, for me, is about expression, about co-creating with something outside of myself in order to expand. It is not about creating a ‘perfect’ piece. Enough of life is about performing. It’s about actually having fun and expressing so that you end up knowing yourself and the world in a new way. It is refreshing, enlivening, and joyful. It is a task of opening up, not following guidelines.

Each person has their own unique way of being creative. For me, it’s usually color and feeling. I see color where it’s not, or more where there is. When I remember things, it’s with more vibrancy than what the eye sees. That vibrancy is often from a feeling I get about the person, object, or view. I paint my internal view of what I experience as much as I paint the external, revealing other aspects about what is viewed.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

For most of my life, I have painted alone except for trainings with other artists and teachers. I joined an art collective a few years ago. It’s a group of about thirty artists and we each have a studio in a large old building in downtown Prescott, AZ. There is a consortium of people that are putting money into rebuilding this area as an art’s district and they are keeping the rents affordable while promoting a vibrant and creative culture. It brings visitors to our block and allows a lot of interaction between people and creatives. There is a Friday evening each month where we all have our studios open and interact intentionally with the public. This has been a very positive way of supporting artistic community and its connection to art lovers.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Currently I’m focused on what it’s like to collaborate with different artists and expand from our interaction. One of the projects I’m working on is an installation that combines art, technology and emotional learning.
I created three large paintings of myself in different emotional states (grief, separated love, and joy) showing where I intuitively felt my organs and their relationship to my feelings. With mixed media artist, Zoe McCarthy, we turned these paintings into 3D sculptures with organs that can be removed by people to intuitively place them within the body or switching them around to another body.
Using technology and animation, we are developing ways to create an even more responsive environment. We built stations that represent ways people cope with feelings. Visitors can bring organs to those stations for a deeper experience of emotional expression. For example, they can take a heart and place it in a fridge, which triggers an animation of what it’s like to freeze their heart out.
We are also using technology in other ways, such as being able to plug in a brain at the technology station to light up the brain as a symbol of numbing or connecting, depending on how we use technology to cope with feeling.
All of this is to explore how we can use different art forms in combination to create an immersive installation.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://CaroleJolly.com