Dreaming of a Dream Painting

Born in Catford, England, Carolyn grew up in southern California, where she studied art and psychology at UCLA. In 1980, she moved to her cliff-side home high above the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur, California, where she studies, writes, and paints amidst the surrounding wilderness.

A passion for creative expression and a lifelong fascination with spiritual transformation has ignited Carolyn to become an award-winning poet, writer, and artist. A chapter in her ninth book, Soul Seeds: Revelations and Drawings, was nominated for the 2008 Pushcart Prize, and a poem in her tenth book, Vagabond Dawns, which includes a CD of Carolyn reading selected poems accompanied by Barry and Shelley Phillips, who have played for Coleman Barks in his readings of Rumi, was nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Prize. Carolyns first book, Climates of the Mind, was translated into Braille by the Library of Congress.

Carolyns books have been used as inspirational texts in universities and healing centers, and, commencing in the Fall of 2010, will be featured, along with the writings of seven other acclaimed women writers, in a permanent course, The Other Half of the Sky: Eight Women Writers, to be taught at Swansea University in Wales. Carolyns poetry has been translated into Romanian, Korean, and Arabic. Her art appears internationally in galleries, museums, private collections, and multimedia presentations, and was featured in a twenty-five year retrospective at The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in September of 2008. To learn more about Carolyns work, please visit http://www.carolynmarykleefeld.com

Art, like music, offers a language beyond the concepts of words. For art to be innovative, it must be preserved from the corruption of stale and redundant perception, created from an inner wilderness.

If art comes from the primordial seeds of existence, from an inner necessity to create, rather than from a preconceived idea of beauty or style, then art reflects in symbolic imagery our primal nature, our oneness with all things.

Through the unique instrument of my being, I let intuitive experiment and exploration ignite choices of color and form, an invention comparable to the composing of the tones and notes of a musical improvisation. For me, art is a spontaneous ride on the crest of the Tao's wave, a nomadic and intuitive exploration born from passion, spawned by the mystery.