Betty Carroll Fuller

My work is about my life...what lives in my heart, what touches my soul. I use a wide variety of materials and techniques to capture the color, texture, and feel of little things and simple pleasures. Good music, fresh, dark coffee, raspberries and sugar snap peas from my garden, the fog lifting on an early morning in autumn...a cold beer on a hot July day, love, kisses, family, friends, weather, storms, literature, poetry, running, the feel of the salt water as I swim in the Bay, the last beach rose of summer on my beloved Cape Cod---the things that enrich my life also inspire my work.

Some of my techniques I borrow from other artistic disciplines. Like a jazz musician who strives for expression by combining exacting skill with spontaneous improvisation, I try to combine good draftsmanship and technical skill with abstraction. I also seek to incorporate the irresistible rhythms and jam session style of jazz into my work. Music and painting have gone together for centuries. It is no accident that painters often talk of their work as having rhythm, beat and tone, or that musicians talk of iridescent sounds and chromatic arrangements. The poet Kofi Natamba described Miles Davis as “blowing blue holes through a red sky”.

Writers and poets have also inspired my work. My favorite writers describe their worlds with reverence. They see the magnificence in the mundane. They make me realize that in examining and painting the ordinary things that are closest to me, I root myself in the world and do my best work.

On my larger pieces, I work primarily in oil on canvas. I also work in acrylic on birch panels that are often shaped or cut out. I frequently incorporate found objects as well as gold, silver or copper leaf. The varied materials reflect light as it changes throughout the day which creates an ever-changing surface. This makes the painting less static and more responsive to their environment. I often use several layers of transparent glazes in different colors to give a sense of depth and richness. Usually, one color dominates each of my paintings. I use color to set the mood. Colors are loud, soft, hot cool, lush, earthy. “Many people look at objects and see the music in them or listen to music and hear its colors.”

In attempting to describe my “style” of abstract art, I think the term abstract/expressionist probably comes closest to a description. The type of work I do is not non-objective, it is always focused on something.... Realism has never been enough for me creatively. When I’m inspired by my garden I want to express the way my lilies smell, the heaviness of the mist on the roses. I try to incorporate emotions, intimacy,

wonder. Sometimes a color is my inspiration, a particular response that colors elicit. My inspirations and mentors would include Jennifer Bartlett, Joan Snyder and recently the minimalists Christopher Wilmarth, Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt. I also love the way John Singer Sargeant paints, his balance of control and freedom, the authority of his brush strokes, his strong, cool female subjects.

Weather and the natural world have been recurring themes for several decades. I am interested in things like the Beaufort Wind Scale, the return of the osprey, melting glaciers as subjects of paintings.