{"id":464,"date":"2010-03-03T19:59:11","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T01:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15bytes12\/2010\/03\/03\/carolyn-coalson\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T21:11:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T04:11:09","slug":"carolyn-coalson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/carolyn-coalson\/","title":{"rendered":"Heavy Paper: A Conversation with Carolyn Coalson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Carolyn Coalson feels another change coming on.<\/p>\n

Best known for her lyrical works in oil on paper, the artist says she believes she is going to move to a different format after this show at\u00a0Phillips Gallery. She doesn\u2019t foresee continuing to do the paper works that she has been doing. \u201cI had the feeling when these were done that I wouldn\u2019t be ordering more paper.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s difficult for an abstract expressionist to predict exactly what\u2019s going to move her to create the next time she picks up a brush. And this artist certainly can\u2019t say what she will be doing in the future.<\/p>\n

Coalson broke with her poetic side for her still-talked-about 2007 Phillips show with ceramist Dorothy Bearnson. There were no flourishes to her pictures then, she acknowledges from her Arizona home. \u201cI turned \u2018Untitled Blues\u2019 upside down after I did it.\u00a0<\/b>The drips went up instead of down. For some reason I flipped it. It confused people, but it set a tone I wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
Untitled Blues<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
2 Blue<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
Crossing<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

There seems to be anger in the under-painting in \u201cUntitled Blues,\u201d as well as something else less easily defined. Particularly if compared to the poetic \u201c2 Blue\u201d in her current show.\u00a0There, the flourishes are back with a flourish. \u201cI had some fun with \u20182 Blue,\u2019 Coalson says. \u201cIt was much more deliberate than \u2018Untitled Blues.\u2019 It didn\u2019t have connotations. I put it away and said, \u2018It\u2019s too blue, but I like it,\u2019 then I maybe put another glaze over it and it was finished.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coalson says that blue is a hopeful, optimistic color while green is a healing color \u2013 and it\u2019s a new color for this artist to use en masse as she does in \u201cCrossing.\u201d\u00a0\u201cI crave green. I think this painting has an oceanic quality. It is water; it is not water. I don\u2019t have any reference for it.\u201d She does acknowledge a second piece of paper gives a horizon to the picture. \u201cI flipped that bottom piece over so it does look like a landscape. It makes it a very calm place to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

The act of painting something that isn\u2019t there visually, of finding a harmony between a developed technique and a state of mind can be unsettling for an artist. Take Coalson\u2019s 2010 picture \u201cAm.\u201d\u00a0\u201cThis one was a gestalt. It just came and went. It didn\u2019t get built up like the others. It didn\u2019t segue between the other pieces. It just happened,\u201d she says. It appeared spontaneously almost exactly in the middle of the paintings she was preparing for the show. Some of the emotion when she was painting for 2007 at Phillips came from the fact that her great friend Lee Deffebach lay dying in a Salt Lake City hospital. Coalson had moved from her Avenues home to Prescott, Ariz., some time before and Deffebach had only grudgingly forgiven her for leaving Utah.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
AM<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
Lift (for Lee)<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
Free Fall<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

She worked hard daily on a painting during Deffebach\u2019s 2005 illness that she titled \u201cLift (For Lee).\u201d\u00a0<\/strong>She recalls talking with mutual friends about Deffebach\u2019s situation every day. \u201cPainting is a subconscious thing that keeps coming up. I stopped painting when Lee died because I knew the painting was finished.\u201d An artist friend visited and said, \u201cCarolyn, you need to put more staccato in that painting,\u201d she recalls, and Coalson said \u201cNo, it\u2019s done.\u201d It\u2019s a stellar picture.<\/p>\n

Like Deffebach, Coalson earned her MFA when she was older than most of the students around her. She started at the University of Utah in her 40s following a divorce and years of \u201cdomesticity\u201d and found painting to be the connection \u201cbetween me and the future life and the questions of the past life. It was a metaphysical bridge between the two.\u201d<\/p>\n

She took the same class from Tony Smith for three quarters because she found it\/him fascinating, and she learned about the glazes she uses so proficiently from Paul Davis. \u201cHe used to say, \u2018Pull it up, bring it down.\u2019 And you do it all with glazes.\u201d She recalls discussing the subject with Bearnson at the 2007 show: \u201cDorothy got it with the glazes.\u201d<\/p>\n

A big change in her work came, Coalson says, when she stopped trying to hurry the painting process along. \u201cI spend time looking rather than painting when something begins to emerge. There\u2019s lots of stuff under that first thing you see, OK? That doesn\u2019t happen hurriedly. I have to let them cure and dry and I have to look at them. I have to spend a lot of time just letting things happen and seeing what they are going to become.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coalson says she mixes ideas, content and intent into the pigment. \u201cA lot of painters do this; I\u2019m certainly not original. There\u2019s just a history that I want to keep going back into. I go into it, paint over it, come back out of it, go into it and go back out again.\u201d<\/p>\n

That process creates some very heavy paper.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sky Rider<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Carolyn Coalson\u2019s paintings will be on display at Salt Lake\u2019s\u00a0Phillips Gallery\u00a0March 19 to April 9, with a Gallery Stroll reception March 19, 6 to 9 pm.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carolyn Coalson feels another change coming on. Best known for her lyrical works in oil on paper, the artist says she believes she is going to move to a different format after this show at\u00a0Phillips Gallery. She doesn\u2019t foresee continuing to do the paper works that she has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":2752,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,14],"tags":[155],"class_list":["post-464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artist_profiles","category-visual_arts","tag-carolyn-coalson"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/045s.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-17 11:54:57","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97947,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions\/97947"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}