Today we’d like to introduce you to Caroline Myers.
Hi Caroline, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I grew up in Mobile, Alabama in an extremely creative family that openly encouraged me to pursue what I loved most. This happened to be creating art! My parents are huge art lovers, so my sister and I were constantly exposed to different art forms and to the creative people that made them. My passion was cemented in every art class I ever took. After graduating from high school, I attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where I received my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting in 2021. During those four years of undergraduate schooling, I pushed myself artistically and had my work featured in various exhibitions and publications both regionally and nationally. Shortly after graduating from UAB in 2021, I attended a summer residency program at The New York Academy of Art, where I was able to learn alongside some of the best young artists in the country. I then moved from Birmingham, Alabama to Clemson, SC where I am currently in my second year of graduate school. I am working on my Master of Fine Arts degree in painting at Clemson University, while also teaching Beginning Painting to undergraduate students. Since moving to South Carolina, I have met so many wonderful, creative people. My professors and peers push me and encourage me to be better in every way. I recently won Best in Show (first prize) in Artisphere’s 2022 Artists of the Upstate Juried Exhibition and was accepted into the SC Festival of Flowers Juried Art Show in Greenwood, SC. I am expected to graduate after my thesis exhibition in April 2023.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I think that many people would agree that the challenges we all face influence how we view the world and are often what inspire us the most. This certainly rings true in my artwork. When I was 15 years old, my doctors found a cholesteatoma, a type of benign but often very invasive and destructive tumor, in my left middle ear. Though not incredibly rare, these types of tumors are typically caught at a very young age before they can do much damage. Mine, however, had grown to the point of eroding the bones inside of my left ear—basically destroying the mechanisms that allow me to hear. Because the erosion occurred slowly over a such long period of time, I didn’t notice my hearing loss until my freshman year of high school. I was in history class when I paired up with my best friend to listen to a video using a shared pair of headphones. I was to the right of my friend and put my headphone into my left ear, but when she played the video, I couldn’t hear anything. Doctors found the tumor and performed surgery to remove it a couple of weeks later. That surgery took the remainder of the hearing I still had left in that ear. Almost a year after this first surgery, I underwent a second surgery to insert prosthetic bones into my middle ear to recover my hearing. Unfortunately, a few months later, we discovered that the surgery didn’t work, and I would remain deaf in my left ear. I was lucky though. Because I had already lost so much of my hearing gradually, the transition was made a little bit easier when I lost the remainder of my hearing in my left ear. As a result of this hearing loss, I learned to make small adjustments in my everyday life. I became incredibly reliant on lip reading when people spoke to me. My friends and loved ones even learned that they should stand (or sit) on my right side so that I could hear them better.
Fast forward a couple of years, and the Covid-19 pandemic began. It was an already difficult and isolating time, but there was an unexpected consequence to being a hard-of-hearing person. Suddenly, everyone was wearing masks, and I could no longer read the lips of the people I was interacting with. This inability to communicate was terrifyingly isolating, and I began to sense people’s frustration when I couldn’t understand them. There was even an incident of someone becoming angry with me for not hearing them, and my partner had to translate what they had said to me. I relied on him a lot for those translations going forward.
I was a junior at UAB when the Covid-19 pandemic began. As an art student, I was required to create a final body of work for my BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) exhibition at the end of my senior year. Naturally, the pandemic was having a huge impact on my life, both as a student and as a hard-of-hearing person. I had to move out of my on-campus painting studio and start working from my home studio/dining room that I shared with my two roommates at the time. My classes switched to Zoom, creating a completely new form of peer-to-peer interaction. When I had to leave the house to run errands, I couldn’t read the lips of the people who spoke to me, and masks further muffled their voices. It was incredibly frustrating that such an essential tool for keeping us all safe during this scary time was, at the same time, making it almost impossible for me to understand the people around me.
These events have thus inspired the paintings that I created for my undergraduate exhibition, Disrupted Reality, and the artwork I am currently making for my master’s thesis show.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I have always had a strong affinity for figurative art. Since high school, I have made money by taking commissions for portraiture. The higher my fine art education has become, the stronger and more conceptually driven my work has become. Although I have a strong traditional background in portraiture, my passion is evolving to focus on contemporary figure painting. My work has been a response to some of the struggles I have experienced as well as just being a human being at this moment in history.
My undergraduate exhibition, Disrupted Reality, was a series of five oil paintings that documented the ways I adjusted to being a hard-of-hearing person during the Covid-19 pandemic. Because face masks significantly impacted my ability to lip read, I began to pay attention to subtle things such as mannerisms, facial expressions, and hand motions when people spoke to me. I photographed acquaintances and friends as they spoke to me or told me a story. These photos captured subtle expressions and varying movements, and I digitally layered them to create double-exposure-like reference images that I would then paint from. The paintings resembled moving portraits and captured the subtleties that became so essential for my understanding of the people around me at that time.
The work I am currently creating is an extension of my undergraduate work. Still looking to the world around me for inspiration, my fascination with the digital came into play. As a young person, technology and digital communications have been present in my life for as long as I can remember. However, when the Covid-19 Pandemic began, there was a surge in our reliance on the digital. Classes switched to online learning via Canvas and Zoom, and jobs shifted to Zoom meetings. Even our interactions with friends and family became reliant on technology. Similarly, after moving from Alabama to South Carolina for graduate school, I depended on FaceTime and social media to remain connected to my friends and family back home. I started painting these people, often using imagery reminiscent of the conditions I view them through, such as FaceTime. I have started researching the visual characteristics of some of these interactions so that I can better translate them into my portraits. I’m hoping that these paintings will represent contemporary portraiture through the lens of our modern-day experiences with communication, interaction, and perceptions through technology.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.carolinemyers.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carolinemyersart
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CarolineMyersArt/
