Carol Stewart

Hammond Harkins Galleries:  Small and Wonderful Group Exhibition opens November 13th, 5 - 8pm, Columbus

The Ohio Arts Council's Riffe Gallery:  The Inaugural Juried Exhibition  November 5, 2015 - January 9th, 2016

Butler Institute of American Art: 79th Annual Midyear National Juried Show

Circles and Squares I  oil on paper on panel  40" x 30"  Honorable Mention

The Ohio State Fair:  August 2015, 2 prizes

Review in the Columbus Underground

"While not new to painting, Carol Stewart is relatively new to Ohio. For that we should be grateful. Her two works included in this year’s exhibition demonstrate an artist of exceptional skill in both large format painting and small. Bottled Peaches, Blood Orange offers a still-life that is deft, sure-handed, and intimate. The palette is restricted to mostly reds, oranges, and some subdued greens. Conversely, Paper Lanterns is ambitious, sprawling, and kaleidoscopic. While ostensibly about lanterns, this work is just as much about paint and the nearly limitless ways it can be applied to the canvas. The end result is an advanced lesson in color, harmony, scale, repetition, and pattern." (see full review here)

"A Moveable Feast"  Group Exhibition at Hammond Harkins Galleries,   March 27 - May 3

Hammond Harkins Galleries:  Carol Stewart:  Poetry of Light and Color  October 17 - November 16, 2014, Columbus Ohio

City Scene Article - Columbus Magazine of Arts and Entertainment, September/October 2014   www.cityscenecolumbus.com/September-2014/Be-Still/

Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art:  Carol Stewart Pattern and Light April 4 - May 24, 2014, Kansas City, MO

Review of Sherry Leedy Exhibition

Two artists take contrasting approaches to the natural world at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art

By DANA SELF 5/14/2014 The Kansas City Star

Carol Stewart and Barbara Rogers’ approach to the natural world is based on distilling that world to light, ornament and, in Stewart’s case, translucency. Ohio-based Stewart paints tabletop still lifes, in which she crowds together vases, jars, bottles, fruit, ceramic bowls, flowers and other typical still-life objects, seemingly chosen for their translucency or reflective surfaces. Her paintings are not quite studies of the objects, but rather examinations of how light travels through the translucent glass and bounces off various surfaces. Stewart completed “Patterns from India” after she returned from a trip to India. Her palette is infused with the saffron, orange, yellow and blue we associate with India’s textile, gastronomic and visual landscape. The colors seem lit from within. In “Blue Painting with Bird,” vases and pots seem to balance precariously on the surface of the tabletop’s raking angle. While translucence isn’t as important in this painting, the way the light bounces from one object to the other energizes the composition. Stewart’s paintings feel as if they have room for accidents. Their jumbled compositions, while clearly planned, still project an organic development, as if the artist kept adding to or subtracting from the arrangements as she worked. In contrast, the combinations of flora, pattern and abstract shapes feel decisive and orderly in Arizona artist Barbara Rogers’ paintings. Rogers approaches nature through a decorative scrim. She combines stenciled ornamental details with images of flowers and other flora, patterns and passages of abstraction. Like Stewart, she is interested in the interplay between objects and their relationship to one another and to the picture plane. Many of her paintings are suffused with the warm, clear, yellowish light particular to the desert Southwest. On her website Rogers notes, “My most recent works continue my exploration of those emblems of the microcosm that I invent or discover. I try to investigate various systems of order and harmony in what at first appears to be nature’s chaos.” While developing visual depth in her paintings, Rogers discovered that ovals tend to create a dimensional space, whereas circles seem to simply lie on the flat picture plane. In “Forest Altar #2” and other large works, such as “Ring Master #2,” the multicolored disks create a successful illusion of depth as they float around the composition. The “Strange Botany” series has tight vignettes of pattern, artifice and flora. While colorful, decorative and very attractive, they nonetheless feel a bit corporate, giving off an unfortunate and slight whiff of the formulaic. Both artists are engaged with the natural world but enter through very different portals. Stewart’s studies of the nature of light have room for spontaneity and the drama of light traveling through glass and reflecting off surfaces, while Rogers’ paintings provide her version of nature with a scaffolding of pattern and ornament.

On exhibit

“Carol Stewart: Light & Pattern” and “Barbara Rogers: Botanica Exotica” continue at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, 2004 Baltimore, through May 24. Hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and by appointment. For more information, call 816-221-2626 or go to SherryLeedy.com

http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/visual-arts/article357370/Two-artists-take-contrasting-approaches-to-the-natural-world-at-Sherry-Leedy-Contemporary-Art.html

Two paintings have been chosen for the Butler Institute of American Art: 77th Annual Midyear National Juried Show Youngstown, Ohio  www.butlerart.com  Jun 30, 2013 Through Aug 18, 2013

Still Life in Blue, 48 x 40 oil on canvas

Red, Pink and Orange, 8 x 8 oil on paper on panel

January 17 - February 28, 2013   Solo Exhibition at The Schmidt Art Center, Belleville, Illinois      http://www.swic.edu/sac/

"Blue Painting"  in the collection of The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, Missouri  www.daummuseum.org

Blue Painting,  oil on paper on panel  48" x 60"

Review of Solo Exhibition at Sherry Leedy Gallery, Kansas City, June 15, 2011

"The Botanical Still Life Paintings of Carol Stewart" article by Kayleigh Osness

©Carol M. Stewart 2015

carolstewartart@gmail.com