“When I was a child we lived on Douglas Mountain in southern Maine. Our house had a big round porch with a wonderful view. I saw the White Mountains on a clear day, watched lightning storms as they traveled from town to town, and glimpsed the northern lights. I was seduced by a love of weather and terrain. This fascination has stayed with me and has affected my life as an artist.
In 2002 I attended a painter’s residency at Pouch Cove in Newfoundland. I had a studio for the month of January that looked into the stormy ocean and I was captured by the view. A year later my husband and I came back to look for a house.
My studio is on a cliff overlooking the ocean near where a river enters the sea. The layers of rocks I can see from my studio window are twisted and folded. In one day, mist, fog, rain and snow can blow across the land ending in a dramatic sunset. The weather changes the nearby river daily, and the river leaves a different imprint on the beach. Although the rocks are fixed, they appear to move like the waves.
A parallel between the weather and my painting process has emerged. My paintings are abstract oils, and I often use mixed media and encaustic. As I scrape and scratch, glaze and layer they develop, changing in a rhythm like the weather on the beach and the ancient rocks.
My paintings make reference to the landscape or express states of the spirit or psyche. The finished work is a record of the processes I’ve gone through as I try to understand the image that is struggling to be expressed. They represent layers of time – a visual palimpsest – reflecting my journey in search of their fleeting revelation.”
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Carol Bajen-Gahm is an artist from Massachusetts who first came to Newfoundland in 2002 for a painting residency at Pouch Cove. Affected by the light, landscape, and people of Newfoundland, she and her husband bought a house and studio on the ocean in Torbay, just outside the capital city of St. John’s.
Between 2003 and 2006 she attended residencies in Costa Rica, Dorland Mountain in California and the Robert P. MacNamara Residency in Westport Island, Maine. In 2006 she received a Joan Mitchell grant to attend a residency at the Santa Fe Institute of Art. She went back to Costa Rica in January of 2016, and that fall she attended the Two Rooms Residency at Duntara, an outport community on the Bonavista peninsula of Newfoundland.
In 2009, R&F Paints of Kingston, NY, equipped Carol’s studio to teach encaustic painting. Carol then became an R&F at-large instructor, presenting encaustic workshops at her Torbay Bight Studio.
Carol has a multidisciplinary master’s degree from UMass Amherst from both the music and art departments. She now concentrates on her abstract oil and mixed media works which explore the effects of nature, place and time on the inner and outer landscape. She likes to investigate dark spaces, tangled areas, time shifts and spatial juxtapositions in her work. She believes it is crucial to be alive to the senses. “My aim is to create a kind of beauty with a shadow; one that has been informed by darkness; beauty that is abstract, spiritual, meditative and eventually, healing.”
Her paintings have been exhibited in Newfoundland and at Art Toronto, represented by Christina Parker Gallery. She is also represented by the Sivarulrasa Gallery in Almonte, Ontario. Her works have been exhibited in Austria, and in the United States in New York City, Kingston NY, Boston, and western Massachusetts.
Newfoundland Sea Stacks - Grebe's Nest #4
Newfoundland Sea Stacks - Grebe's Nest #5
Old Ochre Moon
Heavy Weather on the Mountain
Twilight
Newfoundland Sea Stacks - Grebe's Nest #2
Cape Spear Battery #11
Cape Spear Battery #8
Encounters: Duntara & Keels (Triptych)
Encounters: Duntara & Keels #1
Root Cellar Meditation #1
Encounters: Duntara & Keels #4
Encounters: Duntara & Keels #3
Encounters: Duntara & Keels #2
Root Cellar Meditation #9
Root Cellar Meditation #16
Root Cellar Meditation #17
Root Cellar Meditation #19
Root Cellar Meditation #20
Root Cellar Meditation #7
Root Cellar Meditation #29
Root Cellar Meditation #6
Root Cellar Meditation #3
Root Cellar Meditation #14
Root Cellar Meditation #28