"Chasing Shadows" Painting

Carol Bivins is a Colorado-based multidisciplinary artist whose abstract and abstracted representational paintings explore the tension between order and intuition, structure and spontaneity. Working primarily in oils, she is interested in the ways mark, gesture, line, repetition, and unexpected color relationships can accumulate into something psychological and emotionally resonant.

Bivins came to painting outside the traditional art-school path. After years working in theater and television in New York and Los Angeles—including appearances in Defending Your Life and Groundhog Day—she turned to ceramics as a creative outlet after relocating to the Southwest. Her dissatisfaction with glazing eventually led her toward drawing and painting. She studied at the University of New Mexico after first discovering painting through a workshop at the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque.

Since relocating to Colorado in 2017, Bivins' work has been juried into exhibitions across the United States and has been recognized with awards including an Honorable Mention in the 63rd Annual Juried Competition at the Masur Museum in Monroe, Louisiana and an Honorable Mention in an exhibition hosted by Agora Gallery in New York. Her work has also been exhibited at D'art 360 Gallery in Denver and Viridian Artists in Chelsea, New York, and has appeared in Artsy Magazine and VoyageLA. Her work is held in private collections throughout the United States and the United Kingdom.

Bivins' paintings are process-driven and intuitively developed, often beginning without a predetermined resolution. She is drawn to the visual and emotional possibilities that emerge when competing elements—line and field, structure and gesture, order and disruption—are allowed to coexist. Whether working within an ongoing series or following a painting somewhere unexpected, she is ultimately interested in the moment when color, mark, and form begin to suggest something beyond the purely visual.