Carole was brought up in a rural area of North Staffordshire, moving south to study for her degree and postgraduate qualifications at St. Martin's School of Art, in London. She began work as a book designer, prior to building a career as a freelance illustrator for major London publishers. Commissions included illustrations for book covers, magazine articles, as well as numerous gardening and craft books.
Nowadays, Carole works from her studio in the beautiful, rural setting of Laddingford, in Kent. Her watercolour and mixed media paintings are inspired by her natural surroundings of fields and orchards. She is particularly fond of grasses and the weedy areas that you find at the edges of fields, ponds, verges and ditches. Her aim is to celebrate the ordinary and everyday in nature, so important for biodiversity, and to shine a light on the tragic loss of much of our woodland and meadow landscape.
Observation forms the basis of Carole’s paintings, though her interest is more in the universality of nature, rather than ‘a sense of place’. The subject is merely a point of departure in the search for an exciting image; with memory, imagination and abstraction all playing a part.
Carole’s mixed media artwork is driven by experimentation and the process of combining media and techniques. Digital mixed media is also part of her practice. It begins with her paintings and allows her to discover striking abstractions, which frequently inspire new work, in a circular fashion.
In 2019, Carole’s first book, Painting Expressive Landscapes was published by Search Press Ltd. Writing has always been an interest and feels like a natural extension to her teaching. Since then, she has also contributed a number of articles to The Artist magazineand has also written her second book, which is due for publication in June, 2024.
