'Seeing Double'

Carol Mordecai Myers is an abstract artist who lives and works in Colorado Springs. Her paintings, often executed in a variety of media are complexly layered surfaces that are built up over a long period of time. Originally from New England, she received her BA in math-psychology from Colby College and her MFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. She has taught painting, drawing, color theory and design at the college level and has participated widely in juried, invitational and collaborative shows.

Artist Statement:

My paintings are grounded in the idea of mindfulness and embodied presence (“being here now, in the moment”) especially when moving through natural spaces  (water, woods, trails). The body of work in this exhibit springs from two recent events in my life—the birth of twin grandsons and the sudden onset of double vision. For me, these events conjure ideas of seeing and re-seeing, the passage of time, birth, aging, renewal, use and loss of senses, celebration and acceptance.

With these thoughts in mind, I create paintings that I think of as spaces to be navigated, often with areas of not-quite-distinguishable writing. Ideas generated in one painting are explored further in other paintings. Certain motifs, colors, patterns, compositions appear and then re-appear elsewhere.

Because I work on several pieces at a time in different media and usually over a long period, I am in a continuous dialog with my work. I have developed a process of building layers and then disrupting the resulting surfaces–through scraping, sanding, washing and recently torching–to reveal underlying layers. This active “erosion” of the work introduces elements of time and reveal what has been hidden beneath; I then decide to keep the new found passages and micro-landscapes or cover them up and let something else emerge/re-emerge.

My hope is that the resulting work take on several dimensions beyond two—dimensions of history, dialog, meaning and form.  Not just seeing double but seeing many times over.