Caro Nilsson’s dream-like, impressionistic landscapes pull the viewer into a specific place that feels outside of time. Gestural marks eddy beneath swaths of color-shift or tactile embroidery thread. Her paintings straddle the line between real and imaginary- understanding the notion that everything is always both. Caro paints primarily from memory, focusing more on the way a place felt than the facts of how it looked. In this way, memory morphs and heightens the shapes, shadows and colors of her landscape- blurring the facts in a way that feels more honest and true to the experience that it came from. At its heart, Caro’s work is about a personal relationship with landscapes, and all of the human and non-human influences and presences within them. 

Rooted in traditions of impressionism, Caro’s paintings depict worlds in which the act of observation (beyond just that of sight) plays a role in their creation. By simply noticing magic within the mundane, the world that we live in becomes full of mystery and excitement, a world of hidden stories, meant to be uncovered by those who take the time to listen. 

Caro was born in Vancouver, Washington and has spent her entire life building relationships with the land in America’s endlessly variable biomes- and translating those feelings and findings into paintings. She holds a B.A. in Fine Art with a Distinguished Major in Printmaking, and a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Virginia. She completed her first solo painting residency at the Dacha in Mystic, CT in the Spring of 2021, and currently lives as a multi-media painter and muralist, painting full time from Salt Lake City.

ARTIST STATEMENT
There are many ways I can think of that love looks like. Sometimes it looks like a garden tomato, or a shared meal, sometimes it looks like a postcard in the mail. Sometimes it looks like the tracks that snails left for us overnight on sidewalks. Sometimes it looks the way a trail in the forest does: a collection of anonymous shared footprints that go somewhere that many somebodies thought was special. Sometimes it looks the way the sky does, once it finishes raining. Sometimes it looks like stopping to look around and say ‘wow’. Sometimes, it looks like this. To me, love always looks like remembering about our communities, communities that are so much broader than just our human neighbors. In our beloved valley, here, the community is the boulders and the scrub oaks, the cliffs, the meadow on the mountaintop, the vast remainder of the inland ocean that we call the Great Salt Lake. The seagulls, the snakes. The owls, the mountain lions. Love looks like remembering that we are a tiny part of a big, unknowable something. Love looks like continuing to care, continuing to bear witness, even when it is hard. At this moment we are watching as an era unfolds. Wildfires, inversion, dust storms – all of these things obscure the air, hiding landscapes (our context, our home) within them. We are unable to see into the distance, to think about time and space and infinite chances. The world as we know it is condensed to a bubble of our immediate surroundings. As we acknowledge our changing landscapes, we must also acknowledge our grief. These paintings are asking what it feels like to hold grief and hope simultaneously, alongside one another. These paintings ask if perhaps they are the same thing, two sides of the same coin. Can we continue to walk during the slow motion unfolding (despite, in spite) and continue to bear witness, with all of our grief and all of our hope? Can we remember that we are small among the ancient others who bear witness alongside us?

LINKS
https://www.carozobservations.com/

IMAGES

Caro Nilsson, “Smoke Portal – Red Castle,” 2022, acrylic and cotton thread on stretched canvas, 48 x 36 in.

Caro Nilsson, “Sunset Peak Doorway,” 2023, acrylic & gouache on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

Caro Nilsson, “We Were There To Witness,” 2023, acrylic, gouache and cotton thread on canvas, 30 x 24 in.

Caro Nilsson, “Rattlesnake Gulch Smoke Portal,” 2023, acrylic and gouache on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

Caro Nilsson, “Slow Motion Grief, Slow Motion Praise,” 2023, acrylic and gouache on canvas, 36 x 60

Utah Artists Directory

Artist listings in our Utah Artists Directories are open to all visual artists who reside part-time or full-time in the state of Utah. The listings will remain on our site as long as the artist resides in the state. There is no annual fee for the artist listings. A one-time setup fee is required to create an artist listing. To learn how to create your listing click here.