caroline beasley-baker

The Garden at Midnight  explores the relationship of “heaven and earth” as seen through various mythic figures and stories—presenting a visual, mythological history that is also personal, poetic, and spiritual.  The style of this group of paintings draws on vernacular architecture and decoration from the Hindu and Mexica cultures among others—a kind of free-form compendium of related mythic styles—along with personally derived symbolic-landscape and decorative elements. Each painting also has a "mesostic" poem -- see Briar Rose/Wks on Paper for the expanation of the form.

Some of the paintings in the series will be used for a painting environment with theatrical light.  (The work is painted for varied lighting and undergoes leaps in color and feeling under dramatic light. ) The Garden is a part of an ongoing series of painting environment installations begun in 1988. 

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The Hem of Her Skirt is a series of small devotional paintings that grew from improvisational extracts drawn from The Garden at Midnight paintings.  The Hem paintings are obsessively rendered with plastic gems, false pearls, and porcelain roses that are used to signify the kind of repetition and implied counting that is a part of saying mantras or praying with prayer beads.

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