A R T I S T B I O G R A P H Y
Born in 1971 in Cape Town, Caroline lives and works in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Her artistic journey has come full circle from art student through to formal graphic design and a career as a commercial designer and marketer. Caroline combines her love of design and art and has been recognised for her wine-made-art and Bokeh style paintings worldwide.
Caroline is inspired by the challenging mercurial qualities of red wine, combined with imported archival wine inks and acrylic coloured ink. She explores portraits with a unique perspective and a vibrant sense of colour and design. Caroline’s curiosity in her research process and intuitive nature fuels her drive to create. She is always looking to carve out her originality in her work with new ideas, incorporating scientific knowledge and through experimentation incorporating this in her own work in a collaboration of what she sees and absorbs in a unique way.
The elements of inspiration behind her Artworks are foremost design, colour and a combination with symbolic textiles in portraiture. Over the years Caroline has expanded her skillset with art courses with the likes of, Greg Kerr. She further maintained with discipline her curiosity by working with a group of artists under the tutelage of well known South- African artist, Marié Stander. In 2014, growing through transferring creative spirit between oil painting, red-wine painted portraits on paper to mixed media. Caroline has developed her unique take on painting and continues to personalise it, embroidering the threads of her existence together on paper and canvas.
Wine art is a highly technical form of painting that takes on a different form and texture. In 2014 Caroline presented her first solo art exhibition. She worked with the concept of the African head scarf that has seen a revival in fashion as an accessory worn by African woman of different ages. ‘The wine, the wedding cup and the head scarf’ brought together in a uniquely African concept at the time in the context of the Wine Estate where she held her exhibition. Often the thread isn’t a deep conceptual context, but a more direct expression of her journey, an exploration of ideas. It is these threads or ideas in her creative process that come together and allow for impetus and creative flow.
This body of work lightly touched on the traditional and contemporary rituals. It is the dynamic use of these textiles and the symbolic meaning in art, from her perspective. Caroline represents the context as a celebration of African traditional and contemporary rituals.
The wedding cup of the wine estate where she held her exhibition, inniated the process of her body of work. The ornate and decorativeness of the Tang Dynasty Cup, her fascination with the richness of history surrounding this, layered with the use of wine ink that presents as a flowing medium takes on a character of its own. The concept of the wedding cup originated in the 16th Century, Tang dynasty era and the adoption of it into Germanic Europe. The hues are bold and powerful, adding meaning to the work which adds to the depth of expression and the long-term investment of her paintings.Her work can be found in galleries and private collections in the USA, China and UK. Caroline’s first group exhibition of oil paintings was held at the PJ Olivier Centre in Stellenbosch in November 2010 and annually until 2015. In March, 2011 for a further five years Caroline participated in the Muratie Wine Estate Art Auction and Caroline’s wine art was selected and exhibited by a juried panel in the Tokara Wine Made Art competition in September 2011, 2012 and 2014. Caroline exhibited at a group exhibition in New York in 2013, at the Angel Orenz foundation with a group of international artists and has participated in group exhibitions locally. Her work is published in the 2014 edition of ‘The Collector’s Guide to Art and Artists in South Africa'. In March 2015, she presented her first Solo Exhibition at Warwick Wine Estate and thereafter in a group exhibition of local and international artists and celebrities for the Cape Leopard Trust at the Donald Greig Gallery in the Waterfront in 2016.Caroline will be exhibiting at ArtExpo New York in 2019 and will be collaborating with an African embroidery artist for an exhibition in 2019.
