Welcome to ArtNSoulWorks blog and art works by Carol Stalcup.  I invite you to take time to browse and reflect.  After spending years as a psychologist and spiritual director,  I am a “late-blooming” artist.   Making art has made me a better psychologist, and working with peoples’ stories has made me a better artist.  I am having a great time making art and spending time with other artists.

Using color, texture and gestural mark-making, I create abstract images that express a combination of internal and external experiences.  I enjoy reflecting on emotion and story,  on noticing the fragmentation, blending/remixing, and distortions that occur as time weaves our memories into a narrative. Sometimes that narrative becomes concrete, unmoveable, heavy or constricting. Sometimes we can change the narrative to make a true story that serves us better, that makes us freer, lighter.

Certain of my images aim to capture a particular moment in time and space—or the memory of a particular moment—with a nod to the ephemeral and associative nature of both perception and reality. Other images, created through multiple layering and/or removal of paint, connect the present moment with the process of time itself.

The passage of time changes the perspective on ourselves and the world we live in. Experiences, real and imagined, enter our visual vocabulary and over time a blurring of reality, dreams and memory occurs. The accretions of experience overlay and mingle with conscious and unconscious moments, layered into a framework to become the story we tell ourselves about who we are, who we were, who we are becoming.  My hope is to create images that open up the viewer to his or her own story in a new way.