Carole Gray-Weihman
biography  ::

born: 1967 in Northern California
reside: Penngrove CA., Willits CA. and Soreze FR.

In 1990, after many years of personal development and introspection, I decided to quit my day job and become a full-time painter. Since then, I've been leading a somewhat sequestered life, meagerly getting by on my earnings and indulging in the irresponsibility of being liberated of employers. Today, I am a devoted painter of what some might consider "the Color Visualist Movement" and others the "New American Impressionist Movement"- more specifically, I paint in the "Hawthorne-Henche Principle".

related:
1999: Merged painting studios with Camille Przewodek. The studio, "l'Atelier aux Couleurs" became an art space for teaching, painting, and selling our work.
2002: Founded l'Atelier aux Couleurs: Plein Air Painting Tours in Petaluma, CA.
2003: Co-founded with Camille Przewodek: l'Atelier aux Couleurs: the Art Academy, "A Master Plein Air Program" in Petaluma, CA.
2004: Took on the position of San Francisco & Northern Ca. Regional Editor for PleinAir Magazine.

artistic influence  ::

I've had the opportunity to study portrait painting with Cedric Egeli and his wife Joanette, former students of Henry Hensche, at their home in Maryland and at the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown since 1999. Due to financial difficulties, the Cape Cod School of Art ceased holding workshops taught by out of area instructors in 2001. The Egelis started teaching again on the Cape independently in a rented studio space on the beach in 2004. After a long two year hiatus, I've returned to the Cape to study with the Egelis. I've also had the privilege of studying landscape painting with Joseph Mendez, former student of Sergei Bongart, in Southern California, locally and in Spain from 2000-2003.  On occassion, since 1999, I attend still-life painting sessions locally with Frank Gannon, another former student of Henry Hensche. Craig Nelson is another local painter that I studied portraiture and still-life painting with during one rainy week in Monterey, Ca in 2001 and have yet to revisit his annual Monterey Workshop. Since 2001, I 've been studying at the Scottsdale Artists' School Off-Site Workshops. In 2002 I was introduced to still-life and landscape painting with Gay Faulkenberry and Jean Perry, and landscape painting with George Strickland. In 2003, I studied figure painting with Peggi Kroll-Roberts in Laguna Beach, California. Then Peggi became our first out of town teacher scheduled to teach at our new school, l'Atelier aux Couleurs: the Art Academy in Petaluma, CA. I have also been studying the "Hawthorne-Hensche Principle" with my mentor, and dearest friend, Camille Przewodek , also a former student of Henry Hensche, since July, 1996.

Our friendship and student / mentor relationship began in a tiny quaint village known as Soreze, France. Today, we are currently restoring a house together in Soreze. In April 2003 I was invited to coordinate a workshop that brought together my two most influential teachers to date, Camille Przewodek and Joseph Mendez. They taught collaboratively for the first time in an intensive two-week plein-air painting workshop in Spain. At last, "the Bongart School of Art" met with "the Hawthorne-Hensche Principle". Together, two modern masters in their own right, taught how 'to see' the relationship of color, form and design. Camille opened my eyes to both the "Hawthorne-Hensche Principle" that originated on the east coast and to "the Bongart School of Art" influence that originated on the west coast. She saw that the two major colorist movements that were happening around the same time on two different sides of the country had more in common than many might recognize.

present  ::

My entire focus, lately, has been to work "en plein-air" - to continue my studies with "the Hawthorne-Hensche Principle" but to also broaden my scope of learning by studying the academic approaches that were specifically derived from "the Bogart School of Art". The commonality of these two schools of painting, was not to teach students how to paint, but rather, how to 'see'. In the Russian School of Painting, Ilya Repin taught Nicolai Fechin, Fechin taught Peter Kotov, Peter Kotov taught Sergei Bongart and Bongart taught and inspired several of my teachers, such as Joseph Mendez and Gay Faulkenberry. Hensche was Charles Hawthorne's protégé. Previously, Charles Hawthorne was a student of William Merritt Chase during the time of Monet. Hawthorne was influential in developing a teaching system directly influenced by Monet, himself.

mission  ::

My goal is to be a qualified 'color visualist' - qualified, by means of being adept and experienced enough - through the collaborative efforts of other students of these rich traditions - to carry on what Hawthorne and Hensche taught their students via my studies with Camille Przewodek, and to further pass on the contributions that Camille has  made through her teachings and dedication to expanding upon "the Hawthorne-Hensche Principle" as her apprentice and teaching assistant. Furthermore, to help keep alive the old acedemic fashion of study that Sergei Bongart instilled in his students and Henry Hensche wrote about in his book, "The Art of Seeing and Painting". The Russian School of Painting and the "Hawthorne-Hensche Principle" are both important artistic traditions that deserve to be fully explored and expanded upon. I hope to find other students and emerging painters that are absorbed in the same explorations that I am -painters that have studied with Hawthorne's, Hensche's or Bongart's master students. I hope to collaboratively push these painting disciplines and inspire other students to further develop these traditions.

past  ::

« closeup view of "heart" and description »

As a lover of art, besides my enthusiasm for nature and the work of the great master painters of our time, I've also, at one time or another, been inspired by neo-dada, political, narrative, abstract / expressionism, figurative, arte povera allegory and constructivism. Throw a little found, funk, junk, pop, abstract / abstraction into the mix and that about covers it. If that sounds chaotic, then you have some mental concept of what my training has been like. Many of my friends wonder how I can make conceptial paintings at all when my adoration lies in the works of realists such as; Sorolla, Fechin, Zorn, Bongart and Cecelia Beaux -as if I'm being unfaithful to the "Color Visualist Movement". I heard George Strickland say that "art is an extremely jealous mistress and it needs your entire focus." But what can one do when there is a battle, a love affair, between the disciplines of abstract and realism - choose? No, but whatever I'm doing, I give it my entire focus.

 aesthetic approach  ::

 « closeup view of "crutch" and description »

In my experimental work of the early 90's, I would combine painting and sculpting,  thereby creating "assemblages". I worked with oils, acrylics, ink, porcelain, metals, fiber, wood and anything else that appeared beneath the sky and piqued my curiosity. My assemblages were designed to act as a metaphor for the whole world, inhabited by items that have been ravaged by time and discarded as waste. The coarseness of the materials I utilized, and the violence with which they had been torn, I think created a powerful tension between beauty and decay. Nevertheless, I strived to keep a sense of order and precision in the work. Roughness and brutality were juxtaposed with serenity and peace. My goal was for the dynamic tensions of the opposing finishes to raise responses to the physical presence in the objects I selected. This experimantal stage, lead me to use my past involvement and study of contrasting elements in the work I do today. Working with abstract shapes was a prodigious springboard for me to begin to study the abstract shapes in nature.

Because of my transition to painting "en plein-air", my large scale "assemblages" began to evolve into large scale "abstract/impressionist" landscapes. To this day, I still prefer a loose painterly approach when working on large canvases, though I have several smaller and more tightly rendered studies in my collection.

conclusion  ::

The numerous "plein-air" studies I've worked on have mostly remained in my collection since my professional training "en plein-air" only just began in 1996; I don't have the "chutzpah" to sell much of it. 2005, marks the year that I market my work, so watch my website, subscribe to PleinAir Magazine or come to my studio to view my most current paintings. As for my "abstract / impressionist" works, they're also offered for sale through my studio in the downtown commercial district of old town Petaluma. 

Englishman John Constable believed the artist should forget about formulas and trust his own vision in finding truth in nature. This is exactly my direction as a painter and what one should expect of me for as long as I have my vision.