Self Portr8 Painting

Carol Bivins is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work can be found in private collections across the U.S. and in the United Kingdom. Growing up in a small midwestern town, she moved to New York and began pursuing her artistic career. After spending many years living in NYC and Los Angeles and working in theater, television and appearing in such films as Defending Your Life and Groundhog Day, she moved to the Southwest. Seeking a creative outlet, Carol turned to an old hobby, ceramics. Dissatisfaction with glazing results propelled her to investigate drawing and painting. After working on her own for over a year, she took her first painting workshop at the Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque. Finding that experience exciting and rewarding, she followed it by enrolling in fine art classes at the University of New Mexico. Looking for new energy, adventure and inspiration, she relocated to Colorado in 2017. Since that time, Carol's artwork has been juried into exhibitions from coast to coast and appeared in Artsy Magazine as part of the Minimalism Exhibition at ShockBoxx Gallery in CA and was included in the Los Angeles exhibition “photoLA 2020,” a collection of portraits of LA Artists and Others by fine art photographer Jeffrey Sklan. In 2021 she was featured in VoyageLA, an online arts and culture publication in Los Angeles. Whether working in oil, acrylics or clay, she has always been influenced by the natural environment and events taking place around her. For Carol, painting serves as a means of wrestling with and expressing her emotional reactions to the world at large. With the dynamism of a colorist, her process-driven, intuitively developed abstract works investigate both the play and the tension created by marks, gesture, line and the cacophony of color as they compete for pride of place on the canvas.