Artist Statement

Caroline Cooley Browne uses simple images and simple techniques to probe into subjects that are ordinary, common, and deeply personal. As a painter, Caroline at first preferred abstraction, but after a sudden death in the family, she turned to small pared-down images of a hallway, as a metaphor for the grieving process. She used suggestions of everyday doorways, windows, and landscapes to imply the most ordinary and painful human dilemmas of grief, memory, and survival.

Caroline still uses simple forms, often a table or chair, but the paintings have become bigger, livelier, and filled with deep, radiant color. “Life goes along, in my chair world,” she writes. “The basic chairs have developed a life of their own, integrating into a society and going on with their lives.” Although her recent work is playful on the surface, it remains grounded in imagination and feeling.

Oil pastel has been her medium for fifteen years. The simplicity and directness of her technique, which relies only on crayon and paper, parallels her simplicity and directness of form. Caroline’s use of color is the most complex aspect of her work. It is the dissonance, range, luminosity, and subtlety of her color work that most directly reveal her understanding of the range of human experience and feeling.

Caroline began serious work in fiber art and received her MFA from the University of Washington in 1979, and has shown her work nationally. She lives on Bainbridge Island, WA, with her family, and is an active member of the Bainbridge Island art community.