A look into the eye-popping art and creative discipline of Athens, Georgia-based artist Carol John.
Words by Christina Cotter | Photos by Carl Martin
December 2, 2021
On an oppressively humid late July afternoon, Carol John works in a repurposed brick chapel in the heart of Athens, Georgia, whose cool white walls offer a quiet respite. Although monastic and spare, the studio houses hundreds of her compositions on paper and canvas. Colorful and energy-charged paintings, large and small, populate the room, lean against walls, fill file drawers, stack up on tabletops, and seemingly jockey for your notice.
At first glance, John’s irreverently wacky pop art is all guilty pleasure. Optic candy arrives via her rainbow-hued canvases splashed with eye-zinging eruptions of pattern and graphic text. She plays/interplays, mixes/remixes her colors, combinations, and forms into a structured roux of layered precision. One sees references to Alfred Julio Jensen’s color theory, Yayoi Kusama’s love of dot-making, and Damien Hirst’s atmospheric series of Colour Space Paintings. Her compositions resonate in their psychedelic firmament, refresh the eye with their op art maximalism.
John’s oeuvre, decades in the making, has been shaped by her somewhat peripatetic life. Before settling with her husband, photographer Carl Martin, in northeast Georgia, she lived in England, the Netherlands, New York, and New Jersey. Her eye has traveled, and her work embodies, the accumulation of years of cultural information, examined and reimagined, sieved and sorted, shined and repackaged. Art and design, material and pop culture, the sacred and the mundane, all coalesce here — and it works.
“I am always looking for a big ‘pow’ in a painting if something can dominate the room,” John says of their visual impact. “I don’t think about it, but it comes through in the process and becomes the spirit of the piece.”
Utilizing checkerboards of alternating color, twisting ropes of blocked color, or consecutive droplets of oil pigments, John weaves and layers her forms on the canvas for undeniable impact. The kinetic composition is not for passive consumption. The visual punch forces the eye to bounce in between and among the forms, with no resting place. Her op art visual vibrations act on the retina like a primal kick-drum pedal. Hyperarousal. Flicker vertigo. The Bucha effect.
“I like to get your eyes going,” John admits. “I do love that op art effect.”
Amid her color-soaked trampolines where shapes romp, slither, collide, and crash, one spots the abstracted forms of everyday items from modern life: crushed cigarettes, broken combs, ice cream cones, or glitter, all strewn thick as confetti, resembling the dance floor detritus of a delirious disco dream. Yet beneath this joy-affirming color play, there exist underlying tensions asking us to question our comfort in these small visual cues and their nod to consumerism, commerciality, and Western culture itself. Have we strayed too far from the elemental in our appetite for all things pretty and shiny? Is the party really over?
“I do feel like the school of art that I am coming out of is that art should wake you up. I like to remind people that you can have color and impact without branding,” John says of her style. “This whole year of COVID was a reminder to get back to nature, and a reminder that you can enjoy looking at something and it doesn’t have to come from a company. You can just enjoy color and form. These aren’t corporate logos.”
Deceptively exuberant, John’s work is born of quiet meditation and passive reflection during the active process of art-making itself. The works flow from one to the next as if in a constant stream of creation, manipulation, modification. She is prolific and disciplined, maintaining a rigorous work schedule to encourage this flow. Her intuition is her guide, not the mathematics of composition but subconscious inspiration. She allows the work to lead her where it wants to go. The elements guide her on new journeys.
“It’s not so much about the visual representation as the interplay of the elements,” John says. “One thing leads to the next, and I am on this path. Once it’s made, that’s alchemy.”
Currently, John is a studio artist at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Midtown and divides her weekly work regimen between her Athens and Atlanta studios. This bifurcated approach to her latest projects means she has multiple paintings in progress simultaneously. When at home, she always walks to her Hill Street studio, where she spends the entirety of her mornings; when she treks to Atlanta, her whole day is devoted to her ongoing work there.
Some forms are revisited in various permutations, as with her stalk, stamen, microphone, streetlamp, strobe light shapes. Make of them what you will. The iconic phalluses, botanic sporophytes, interstellar starships, what have you, resonate and pulsate with radiant energy; they are not in stasis. They are in the state of becoming. They are acting and being acted upon.
John can see archetypal symbols emerge within her compositions and encourages them, hoping they lead the viewer into a multilayered experience of her work. In this way, she is able to play with profundity, elevate the banal.
Although modern in her approach and sensibilities, John appreciates the connection to the lineage of all painters through these symbolic archetypes and through her raw materials. “I do love the fact that I work with paper made of wood, oil made of natural seeds, brushes made of animal hair. ... Even though these paintings don’t look like what people were doing 100 or 1,000 years ago, they were using these materials. I love that connectivity.”
A graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York, John asserts that although her work ethic and hours of time alone create a cloistered sensibility, she is interested in and enjoys the work of all the artists she is acquainted with in Athens and beyond. Connection, between the artist and the art viewer, is also paramount. John wants her work to elicit a reaction/interaction. Her hook may reside in an optically pleasing, geometrically structured composition, but once there we can allow the Jungian symbols to create a deeper dive, accessing an unconscious awareness of meaning.
When John sidesteps urban/suburban totems of the everyday by further reduction, she enters more metaphysical territory. Abstraction gains momentum. Large-scale works steer her into new and uncharted waters where Pointillism is reduced to the most fundamental abstraction, a repetitive dot-placing that represents a ground zero of basic components. As with her previous forays into color theory and impact, the dots’ color, placement, and proximity create vibrational tension. Fixed between larger circles, an interstitial universe is created. Loosening our grasp on earthly concerns, we catapult between the micro and the macro. The vibrating dots embody this tension: a cell, a powder, a pill, a zygote, a constellation, a universe exploding and contracting in the circle of a microscope’s lens. Inside out/outside in. A disco ball cosmos. We are at once the gazer and the gazed upon.
“Pop Goes the World” is available in Issue No. 2 of The Bitter Southerner magazine.
Christina Cotter is an arts writer, photographer, former managing editor of Flagpole magazine, and production coordinator of the biopic “Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew.” She holds a master’s from the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and currently works in publishing at the University of Georgia Press. She’s lived in and around the Athens/Atlanta music and arts scene for over 30 years, and she and her husband own Wuxtry Records in Athens, Georgia.
