“We are all made with hearts, desiring truth, goodness and beauty”

On a chill, mid-January morning, Oregon’s Willamette Valley is awash in a steady downpour of rain. Inside the historic Glatt House, in the farming town of Woodburn, the dismal weather is forgotten as I step into a warm, welcoming space. With lofty ceilings and plenty of natural daylight, the converted farmhouse provides a perfect venue for community art classes, a place for local artists to share their creations. Charming landscapes, academic still lifes, and soft pencil portraits are displayed about the room.

Somewhat apart from these traditional pieces is a series of very different and abstract works. Some are watercolor or pastels framed under glass, others are acrylic on board or canvas. In each, the viewer’s eye is arrested and drawn to dynamic bursts of color. Bearing titles like, “Creation”, “Womb” and “Radiance of Being”, these pieces radiate a primordial exuberance. Colors are layered, sculpted and contrasted with a tactile, urgent significance.

The mind behind these works is self-taught artist Carol Anderson, an energetic woman in her 70s, with smiling, piercingly sincere eyes. Dressed in reds and purples, she is as vibrant and life-filled as one of her own works, and happily greets friends on this dreary day as they arrive to view her most recent art exhibition. With her typical enthusiasm, she does not hesitate to grab my hand and offer an impromptu prayer to the Holy Spirit to bless this encounter between two people seeking the truth. “Encounter” is an important term for her; it’s clear she always aims to be present when interacting with others.

While non-representational, her works have inherent organic qualities that convey a sense of unfolding, of striving. Many include indistinct forms that evoke both plant growth or human forms, striving upward from cool, dark blues and purples, to the warmth of rich oranges and yellows. There’s also an innate sophistication in these pieces which sets them apart from the efforts of a mere hobbyist, and although they are born from the artist’s deeply personal forays into art therapy, they have an unmistakably universal appeal.

Stopping before a large framed watercolor, she explains how she created it with a spontaneous wet-on-wet technique: “I was so thrilled with how the water flowed in and out of the painting appropriately, so that you’ve got the clear distinction between the reds and the purple. As I stepped back from the finished work that Sunday night, I was thrilled as I could see her come to me. I named her ‘Womb’ because it just looked like a little fetus. As we are formed in our mothers womb…Psalm 139…it certainly seems to be appropriate to hear the knitting of our little bones in our mothers’ wombs.”

Carol excitedly knits scripture passages, saints’ writings, and her own religious experience into her pieces with the boldness of a prophet or mystic, rarely hampered by hesitation or self-consciousness. With her highly perceptive, intrinsically artistic nature, she has struggled most of her life to acquire a language that adequately conveys her kaleidoscopic range of thoughts.

She explains she’s always grappled with the big questions, questions of how the human soul relates to its surroundings and to God, questions of suffering, growth and joy: “…existential questions of ‘who am I?’, ‘why was I created?’ ‘what has meaning?’ ‘why am I alone in a crowd?’”

Her complex, subtle ideas regarding these concepts are often difficult for observers to grasp at first. For example, the newest piece at this show is a thick impasto acrylic on canvas, “Ode to Benedict”, that doesn’t immediately correlate to thoughts of the late Pope Emeritus. The square canvas is charged with intimate emotional energy; lush, warm reds push upward against the lowering chaos of deep, electric blue-purples. It records her feelings on the evening of the death of Pope Benedict XVI, and how she was struck by the magnificent sunset that lightened the dreary winter farmlands for a few joyful minutes. The quality of the light, the drama of those few moments, instantly became associated in her mind with one of her beloved influences, and she raced to capture the intangible core of the experience.

The seeds of Carol’s artistic gift lay dormant for much of her life, as upon graduation from high-school, she received no encouragement to go into any profession other than nursing or teaching; she found that rural Catholics of that era regarded ‘art’ as suspect, synonymous with hippies and the countercultural movement.

After a stint as a high school teacher, she focused on raising a family of five with her husband, Gary. Sometime in the 90s, she investigated the art therapy program at the (now-defunct) Marylhurst University. She was intrigued by the concept of using art to help people work through their  problems and to heal. However, as she’d already acquired 44 hours in a Master’s program for teaching, she was beginning to see that a more traditional academic approach to art and healing was not a good fit for her unique vision.

Yet when her 18-year-old daughter suffered a severe manic depressive episode that required hospitalization, Carol rediscovered the practice of art therapy in a new and profoundly personal way. Feeling helpless to reach her daughter, overwhelmed with stress and anxiety, she instinctively turned to paper and paint to deal with the crushing burden of her emotions. The works she created during this time of family crisis were not illustrations or literal records of events unfolding beyond her control. Rather, they were intensely private journal entries expressed in the language of pure color and nonrepresentational shapes, a secret code that allowed her to distance herself from her frustration and emotional pain.

At the time, she hid these pieces in her garage, but couldn’t deny the release and relief she experienced while engaged in this visual and kinetic journaling.

She comments, “My expressive style has developed from paying attention to the daily circumstances given to us as a family. Our first major medical situation  threw me into the art therapy arena, allowing me to lay out in strong, colorful brush strokes, the tremendously complex and mysterious nature of one’s mental health.”

In 2005, her creative journey reached another milestone when she discovered the writings of Fr. Luigi Giussani. His insights provided her another type of tool for expressing herself. She explains, “I was intrigued by the invitation to pay attention to my own heart, to my own being, to my own unique way of seeing the world as a creature. Thus, the influence of the fullness of reason, the heart, began this leg of my journey. I was moved, and began to wrestle with fighting to ‘stay present’, with the Mystery of the Presence.”

Taking great delight in, and inspiration from, many of Giussani’s writings, she points out one large framed pastel, where a dominant flower form, heavy with reds and oranges, is thrusting up to the light.

“The painting was done in a very cold little motel room. I was using my freezing fingertips. The article I was reading was on the ‘Radiance of Being’. I thought that phrase was magnificent, magnificent, and it actually corresponds to my heart. I happen to have a fresh plucked rose bud, that I had discovered on one of my jaunts out for coffee in the morning…so I easily could observe and express her radiance (with) water colors, pastels (and) oil pastels”

Carol avidly devours the journal Communio, finding a treasure-trove of ideas from other eminent Catholic minds such as Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthazar, Edith Stein, and D.C. Schindler.

Thus, words like ‘Truth’ ‘Being’ and ‘Presence’ dart rapidly through her speech, like bright birds in a tangle of tree branches.They are signs of a heart that’s endured a hefty share of suffering over the years, but still retains deep reserves of wonder and joy.

She is particularly moved by the thesis in Giussani’s The Religious Sense, that “we are all made with hearts, desiring truth, goodness and beauty.” As she explains the meaning behind the elemental forms and hues in her works, she becomes even brighter, more animated. She tells me she “thinks in pictures”, and that it has taken years to be able to share her inner vision by transmuting emotion and insight into raw color and form.

To converse with Carol about her art is more an exploration of philosophy than a discussion of the rules of visual forms or media. As with much abstract art, these pieces are intensely personal, mysterious, and demanding. They require one to take time to study the rich interplay of color and textures, the layering. Most importantly, they offer an encounter for anyone investing the time to contemplate both the artist’s intent and her sense of presence.

This morning, sitting in the restful, light-filled art gallery, she shimmers with restrained energy as she describes how her painting process relieves her mental suffering, and how she has a sense of integration when she reviews her life, and identifies patterns and meaning. She finally sees more clearly God’s guiding hand, even in smaller things such as vacations in Arizona. Time spent in the desert, relishing the warmth and peaceful silence, has enriched many of her works with a glowing palette of reds, oranges and yellows.

Whether dealing with the rewards and heartbreaks offered by a generation of grandchildren, or looking back at past family trauma with a more enlightened eye, Carol has plenty of opportunity in this “vale of tears” to keep expressing herself and push her creative vision to new horizons. Her openness to God’s grace in all circumstances is an example of a heart that, instead of growing stony through the bitterness of life’s hardships, has become a warm heart of flesh.

Art has instinctively become a form of prayer for her, each work inspired by an encounter with an idea, event or person. She realizes that she needs “…to keep an awareness that I am painting with people, and maybe helping them awaken to the truth of their own hearts, being made for truth, goodness and beauty.”

Uniting her experiences and observations with the physical matter of paper and pigment, she’s a lovely example of an artist genuinely seeking to explore and understand God’s mysteries, always hinting at the inexpressible, the Word made flesh towards which we should all be drawn.

• Carol Anderson does not have a website, but can be reached at: carolanderson5632@gmail.com