Carol Beth Icard | Paintings

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Q&A with Carol Beth

1. What is your chosen medium?

I work exclusively in oil paint and cold wax medium. Most of my paintings also include a mixture of additional media, such as dry pigment, paint sticks, pastels, etc.

2. How did you start your career in art?

I was a craftsperson for years before turning to painting and going back to college in my mid-forties. I’ve continued to focus almost exclusively on painting for the last 20 plus years.

3. What informs your art?

Everything “goes into the pot.” I no longer begin with an idea. I paint the first few layers with carefree abandon and then focus on what it communicates to me. I find this path to be both intuitive and treacherous. I often reference words, metaphorical objects like houses, bowls or chairs, but I don’t set out to depict them, they can just “show up” and I allow them to get more focused.

4. What jobs you have worked other than as a professional artist?

In my life I have worked in a library, a bookstore, and a lot of art galleries, but I’ve also knit and sewn and made baskets and pies many years ago.

5. What questions do you ask yourself when starting to work?

Now, let me see, what color do I feel like today? Will I use my palette knife or the brayer to put down this first layer? Nothing deep. That comes later.

6. Do you have a quote that’s important to you displayed in your studio?  If so, what is it? 

I have many quotes pinned up in my studio but I especially love Joan Miro’s “I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”

7. Which artist (living or not) would you most like to invite for dinner? What would you serve?

Georgia O’Keefe. I think she would enjoy one of my no recipe meals using a small amount of some kind of protein, onions, garlic, chili peppers, and leftover vegetables, perhaps white wine, pasta or grain, and maybe a little  goat cheese. Every time I do this it comes out different, using as many local ingredients as I can find.

8.  What has been your most unusual request for your art?

This has not happened to me directly, but I heard that someone who saw one of my sold works said he wanted to ask me to paint one just like it for him. Uh. No. Not the way I work at all. Every painting has a distinct life of its own.

9. What music are you listening to these days?

The old time women in the Blues, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, etc., but I switch it up a lot since I have eclectic tastes. I’m fond of Fado music, and other world music, as well as Playing for Change where musicians from all over the world play remotely together.

10. What is on your nightstand?

I don’t have a nightstand, but the bureau near me has a clock, a large rose quartz crystal and a lamp closest to my bedside. I don’t read in bed so no books there, just everywhere else in my house. :D

About Carol Beth

There is no one source for my art except perhaps the melting pot of my mind.  I don’t begin a painting with a concept.  I just begin, like I begin a day, trusting that everything will work out alright.  Trusting that somehow the passion I feel for color, mystery and metaphors will show me the unmapped route to a completed work.

It’s a matter of believing in my instincts, letting go of fear, striding into the unknown and leaning into the clues I find in my unconscious gestures and marks.  Cushions of contemplative assessment, sometimes for days or weeks, help me proceed.  The conversation I have with each work in progress is what helps me find my way through the challenges. I follow what it is trying to communicate.

Like life, right?  You wake up day after day and hope for the best, fielding the surprises, creating some messes, and treasuring what moments you can.  

What a journey it is.