Carolyn Schlam

Carolyn Schlam is an expressionist painter, sculptor, glass artist as well as a writer who has exhibited throughout the United States. Her works remain in prestigious permanent collections including the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery, and Cedars Sinai Art Collection. Carolyn has written numerous periodicals and is the author of four artbooks and a novel. Artbooks include works such as The Creative Path and The Zen of Art. Recent exhibitions include participation at David Barnett Gallery in Milwaukee, DK Gallery in Marietta, Georgia, Annmarie Sculpture Center in Solomons, Maryland, Channing Peake Gallery in Santa Barbara, Santa Paul Studio C in Santa Fe, and Treat Gallery in New York.

With child as well as doll-like features, the paintings and sculptures of Carolyn Schlam incorporate smooth pale pastels and angular distortions to figures which hint at influence deriving from Picasso’s Blue Period. Whether captured in dreary, open interiors or monochromatic backgrounds, her portrait actors stare ominously into the viewer. Despite the innocent and curvature-accentuated features, there remains a darkness to the works on a psychological level as if to indicate trauma or melancholy reflection. Sometimes both the paintings and sculptures will incorporate design elements such as polka dots, diamond shapes, or rectangles in a manner similar to Victorian-era wallpaper. Such connotations suggest an integration with aging interiors and infrastructure revealing a time-lapse in Carolyn’s depictions.

These characters within Carolyn’s works reveal psychological portraits and narratives despite their simplified features. Although the eyes on the figures are doll-like, they are rendered with great care and with attention towards the audience indicating Carolyn’s desire for the viewer to build a connection to her subjects, the composition, as well as the painting as a whole. The pale, pastel colors and smear-like application of the paint indicate expressionistic tendencies and conveys a sense of individualism in these portrayals of figures. Through fragmentation of interiors, composition, people, and color, Carolyn orchestrates constructs of actors engaging with broken yet unified space in erratic yet harmonic composure. Her skill can be defined as simultaneously rendering fragments with a sense of great structure.

Little French Girl (pictured above) contains a space which expresses a study of character in relation to the figure. The young girl stands along a piece of furniture which seems dilapidated in angular distortions with the interior awash with pale pinks, blues, and pastels which seems to foreshadow either her current untold narrative or her future. A mysterious painting engaging the viewer to contemplate on the purpose of color as well as angular distortion.

Carolyn Schlam advances the achievements of great artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Lee Krasner by invoking the dynamic aspects in painting from a viewpoint of harmonizing fragments and invoking child-like traits in creating structures, compositions, and figures which reflect toy-like and doll-like qualities. As a result, these character and interior studies reflect on innocence and the ominous qualities of negative space. These complex paintings are sophisticated, haunting, mesmerizing, and emotionally-driven to reflect character studies, not in capturing reality, but rather, interpreting how material can be manipulated to use surface and form to express intricacy in puristic composure.

https://carolynschlam.com