19 January 2012

Leaving Los Angeles brought painter Carol Baum closer to the constellations.

"In L.A., you couldn' t see the stars," recalls Baum, a Massachusetts native who spent 22 years in California before relocating to Newbury in 1994.

"One of the reasons I wanted to move back here is because I couldn' t imagine spending the rest of my life where I couldn' t see the night sky," she said.

Baum's most recent series of paintings, titled seven, was inspired by her love of the outdoors, the night sky and stories of biblical heroines. Executed either in oil or watercolor, the seven series features images of leaves and flowers that Baum encounters during her extensive time outdoors, which she then layers with charts and diagrams of the constellations. Each painting subtly marks time, and through them Baum hopes to make a connection between the natural world and the spiritual realm.

"I want my work to be mysterious and beautiful and interesting, so that is what I am challenged to do," Baum said. And though the paintings are closely tied to the landscape around her, Baum points out that they should not be categorized as traditional landscape paintings.

"I consider it abstract, but it is based on real stars, real flowers and real leaves. I' ve never been a realistic painter; I' m intrigued by feelings and by expressing myself," Baum said.

Baum's interest in constellations began long ago. She began collecting star charts that she cut out of the New York Times and kept in a small box in her studio. While working on a series of paintings about the war in Iraq, she was overlaying paintings of flowers with war planes, but was unhappy with the result. She remembered the box with the images of the night sky, and instantly felt that the stars, and not war planes, had a place in her work. Her series All Vows is what emerged.

As Baum was moving away from the square format of her All Vows paintings into rectangles, she was drawn to the constellation Pleiades, called The Seven Sisters, which in turn led her back to stories she had heard about biblical heroines. She recalled an ancient Druid myth about the veil dividing the living from the dead being thinnest at the end of April and October. Baum then wondered "if the heroines would be more visible at the times my paintings represent".

Though together these themes inform each of the paintings in the seven series, their presence is not overt.

"There are lots of different themes in these paintings," said Baum. "Though the paintings are named after the heroines, there is nothing that would lead you to say 'Oh, this is definitely that' and I like that."

—Jamie Farrell