As Boston Globe art critic Cate McQuaid describes Bolsey’s work “These paintings are grand painterly abstractions that use recognizable shapes to explore the notion of space and the phantasm of light.” *
Carole Bolsey works on a large scale, in paint on canvas, installations, constructions, sculpture, and architectural design. Her work appears in public and private collections throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Bolsey’s artwork centers on nature in highly simplified land and water scapes interpreted through light, space, gesture and scale. Barns and watershacks, rowboats and canoes, skiffs and workboats, open land, water, and skies reflect each other in brilliant contrasts of light and shadow, near and far, immensity and small scale.
"explores the notion of space and the phantasm of light"
and 'pushing perspective'
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Her subjects also include life-size horses and bulls, and the simple shape of a barn---The Shape With No Name, as she calls it---expressed in powerful contrasts of light and shadow. Bolsey is known for the dynamic energy and painterly expressiveness of her work, using large scale to “generate spaces that aren’t there, to physicalize the experience so it feels like stepping outdoors.”
New York art critic, Donald Kuspit, has written the introductory essay on Bolsey’s work for the recently published book, The Shape with No Name: the Art of Carole Bolsey (Grayson Publishing, Washington, DC).
Bolsey has taught painting, drawing, and Visual Studies at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and Carpenter Center for Visual and Environmental Studies, at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Decordova Museum School.
A native of New York, Bolsey studied with Gustav Rehberger in Manhattan as a teenager, at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy; at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Geneva, Switzerland; and graduated from Bennington College.
She lives and works on the South Shore of Massachusetts in the United States.
* The Boston Globe, Cate McQuaid, Nov. 1999, “Seeing the light on her landscapes, brilliantly”
Photo by Celia Pearson