Her art began with layers of fiber; now Caroline Cooley Brown plumbs the depths with paint, pastels.
For Caroline Cooley Browne, layers of experience have transformed her layered art over two decades.
For the paint and fiber artist, turning 360 degrees in the library conference room where her 20-year retrospective is hung reveals a compact statement of the artist’s development, synopsized in the show’s title: “Where I Come From and Where I Am Now.”
“I’m excited about the changes. I like the fact that I’ve changed over the years,” Cooley Browne said.
A Seattle native whose family has roots in Pennsylvania and New England, Cooley Browne enrolled at University of Washington in the mid-1970s to study fiber arts, getting her bachelor of fine arts degree in 1974 and staying at UW to complete a master’s degree in 1979.
In school, Cooley Browne made wall hangings, layers of organza and other materials that depended on surface design.
Then, she was forced to take a mandatory painting class with noted UW teacher Norman Lundin.
The exposure to color and Lundin’s demand that her two-dimensional works be as strong in black and white as they were in color began to shift her sensibility from fiber to paint.
“I was still working layers of fabric,” she said, “building them up – just the way we have layers, influenced by what lies below the surface.
“But then I found I really like the immediacy of working with the color. I didn’t like all that designing.”
As a young artist, Cooley Browne was searching for depth, looking to
penetrate the surface and to build up layers of meaning.
She would make many variations on one composition, exploring the one image as much as she could – an approach she would revisit many times.
Then came the death of a brother in 1982 and the birth of her first child that same year – a combination of wrenching life-cycle events that brought all artmaking to a halt for several years.
When Cooley Browne began to make art again, it would be infused with the meaning she had sought.
“In 1984, I started doing little drawings but I realized I was still dealing with his death,” she said. “A few years later I was in my parents’ house and I saw this hall – a long dark hallway with an open door at the end, and a peach light outside.
“It became a metaphor for the process I was going through.”
Cooley Browne began to work again in layers, combining acrylic, pastel, oil bar and window screen.
The resulting pieces didn’t read as self-conscious surface manipulations. “In these works I was able to dive into that subconscious,” she said.
P astels began to edge out fabric as the artist began work on a series of small drawings.
“The oil pastels allow a layered, rich surface of color and texture,” she said. “Using color as a tool, I create simple, almost abstract compositions.”
The paintings and drawings often depicted chairs – furniture that, for Cooley Brown, symbolizes life passages and human emotion.
“I’ve always loved chairs, and the shadows of chairs,” she said.
In later series, the chairs acquired the poignancy of memory.
In one such work, the horizon line is foreshortened, implying great distance. The simplified shadows of chairs move into the distance, like footprints of a departed presence.
Her most recent works have taken her to the edge of pure abstraction, a location she says feels essential now.
“The abstract composition is the most important part, along with the color,” she said. “If there are recognizable objects, that’s ok, but the composition is most important.”
For Cooley Browne, seeing the whole of the two-decade path serves to direct her toward her own horizon line once more.
“I know that I’m a better painter,” she said. “The other works, when I look back, seem shallow.
“I hope I go on changing.”
* * * * *
Work by Caroline Cooley Browne is on display in the Bainbridge library meeting room through January.
Information: 842-4162.
