About Caroline Perkins

 I’m in love with materials: I mix my oil paints and create textures with painting butter medium and pigments. I also experiment with oil bars pushing them to see what they add to the painting. The bars make me feel more connected to the mark-making. I like using my fingers and hands to apply the paint also I use a variety of tools to work into the paintings in addition to brushes I use credit cards, combs, sponges and rags.

 Making my materials gives me an immersive encounter with the work, mixing myself into the creative experience. When I use raw pigments in the process of making the paint, they give a greater depth and vibrancy of colour. I work into the canvas first with acrylic and then apply screen printing directly or onto tissue which I apply using a press onto the canvas. I like to make large paintings to give myself plenty of space to make expansive gestural marks.

 Often the subject starts from a shock or something seen or encountered, which is the vehicle for that experience and my memories. I tend to create abstract figurative paintings amid an environment which might allude to the forest or not.

My work is a platform for the many references I absorb; they come into being drawing on memories that I interpose into the process. I make practice pieces in a sketchbook and in maquette form that are changed and manipulated when I paint. I don’t concentrate on the outcome; I trust I have felt how to bring the imagined into the real.

 I have been making art all my life but only recently came to the position of being able to sell. I am excited by the idea that a piece has a life of its own; it has a desire to be seen. To that end, I am excited to be part of the Art Finder community.

 I started my artistic endeavours in Falmouth in Cornwall, where I did my first degree in Studio Ceramics. I now live in Hampshire, where I received a first-class honour degree in Fine art. My Instagram account is: caroline_perkins_art