CHAPTER 23
Throughout her ever-evolving relationship with Steve, Carol dug deep to find a place of healing and a way to move on, perhaps to handle all the struggles he threw at her, or to discover why she was putting herself through them. Nurturing the artist in herself, she created handmade cards, adorned with yarn and tassels, and wrote messages in beautiful calligraphy to family and friends. She also discovered Touch Drawing.
While Carol was still teaching at Prescott College, she found a couple of women whom she asked to come to town to give guest lectures or presentations, and with whom she formed lasting connections. One was Deborah Koff-Chapin, the founder of Touch Drawing, who conducted weeklong sessions on Whidbey Island, Washington.
Between 1997 and 2007, Carol traveled to the island for five of these retreats, which proved therapeutic and inspirational for her, as she and other spiritual women bonded through drawing, dancing and exchanging dreams to heal, get in touch with their inner selves, and achieve “wholeness.” The bonds were so strong that she was able to call on these women in times of need.
“Touch Drawing is a practice of creative, psychological and spiritual integration,” Deborah explained.
Carol found one of her most satisfying forms of creative expression in monoprinting. This medium involves making individual prints through the application of inks with brushes or rollers, known as brayers, on a flat hard surface like glass or Plexiglas, and running the plate through a press. After putting the ink design down, the artist lays a piece of paper over the surface, then runs it through a press to push the ink into the paper. More ink can be added to the design after the first run if desired. Multiple passes can be done on the same piece of paper, or a fresh piece can be placed over the ink that’s already been used once, to make a lighter “ghost” print.
“They’re so whimsical, you never know what you’re going to get,” said monotype artist Joanne Frerking, who was a yoga teacher when she met Carol. Carol invited Joanne, who taught yoga in a therapeutic manner, to guest teach her class, “Yoga Psychology,” in which she focused on the spiritual side of the social science.
Carol had been working on her art for many years, but she’d always been “afraid of hanging out her shingle, declaring herself an artist,” Debbie Wren Hill recalled. So Carol started out small and worked her way up to have her first gallery opening.
As she approached her fiftieth birthday, which represented a significant milestone to her, she’d created enough pieces to hold a special birthday show at an art frame shop in Prescott, The Frame & I Gallery.
The start of the show was announced in the Daily Courier on September 24, 2004. The article stated: Becoming a professional artist will be her last career and the best 50th birthday present she could ask for. The show, which ran through October 15, displayed fifty of her best pieces.
“Instead of having a regular birthday, I wanted to do something more symbolic,” Carol told the Courier.
As Debbie had described, Carol told the newspaper that she didn’t allow herself to become a professional artist until she’d stopped teaching. Carol said she’d always felt she was an artist, but somehow couldn’t give herself “permission” to be one. Explaining her approach in somewhat abstract terms, she said that when she was creating art, she felt vulnerable as she struggled to let herself acknowledge her feelings and stay in the moment. As such, her artwork represented images of healing, reflecting a parallel of sorts to the work she performed in other parts of her life.
The gallery opening, which featured live music and refreshments, was well attended. And although she and Steve were separated, Carol was thrilled that Steve not only came, but he bought a number of her pieces “because he loved it so much.”
“That’s what I remember her telling me. It meant so much to her that he came,” Debbie recalled. “He wanted to support her work, didn’t want it to get away.”
By that time, Joanne Frerking was working in the same medium, also adding collage to her monotypes. When she saw Carol’s show, she was so taken that she approached Carol about selling her art at Van Gogh’s Ear.
Prescott may be a small town, but quite a few local artists live there. And yet, only in recent years has it become a decent market for art. Carol’s work stood out among the more typical southwestern cowboys-and-Indians fare.
“Her artwork wasn’t the norm for the area,” said John Lutes, a blown-glass artist of thirty years and one of Van Gogh Ear’s four co-owners. “It’s very different for Prescott to see someone with such a sophisticated contemporary form.”
Starting in fall 2004, Carol began showing and selling her art at the gallery, where she worked as a lab assistant and also in sales as an art consultant, about fifteen hours a week for the next two years. She earned an hourly wage plus commission.
She dressed conservatively in flowing silk skirts, pants or dresses, with short heels or flats. Also, because the store sold jewelry, the sales people were encouraged to wear the wares, which Carol did in a tasteful way.
“She had a classy presentation of herself. She was very beautiful,” John said. “I think she was very, very pretty, myself, but not in a flashy sort of way.”
Carol’s sales performance ranked reasonably well in the store. “It requires a lot of knowledge and finesse to sell art, and she was very good at it,” he said.
He added that she wasn’t an exceptional saleswoman, however, because she had so much distraction in her life with Steve and the family problems he created for her by calling and stopping by the store while she was trying to work.
“Steve would come in all the time, sauntering in, bringing coffee. This was when they were separated. You would just feel it. He’d walk in and you could just feel the bad vibes,” Joanne recalled. “He was sucking up to her. . . . He had this way of ingratiating himself, just being the nice guy, and you just wanted to throw up. But she fell for it.”
While Steve acted magnanimously toward the women, John said, Steve never paid much attention to him, acting as if he were of “finer stock” than John. “He was just that sort of haughty kind of person, you know, arrogant.”
John tried not to listen to the discussions between Carol and her estranged husband, but he couldn’t ignore the raised voices. Steve was more quietly firm and stern than loud, John recalled—and Carol seemed angry and vehement as well. Steve was still seeing Barb, but he would tell Carol it was over and then Carol would see them together. But more often than not, the conversations were about financial matters.
“I would never say Carol was a weak individual. I would see her as strong also,” John said, noting that she used to stand her ground with Steve, “with good reason.”
At this point Carol still had hope for her marriage. “She wanted it to work out. She always felt he was her soul mate and he’d learn,” Joanne said. “He had to learn to be on his own. In a sense he had to work his way back to her. He had to earn her trust back, which, of course, he never did, because he never stopped seeing other women. That was horrible. It was like a knife in her chest.... And then there were the girls. They’d see each other because of the girls.... In the beginning she allowed it. They just didn’t really separate.”
Art—whether it was selling other artists’ work or creating her own—seemed to make Carol happy, and so did her daughters.
“If her daughters were in town or visiting or came into the gallery, she always seemed very happy to be their mother and to work things out with them,” John said.
To John, Carol seemed like a lovely but troubled soul who was in a constant struggle to be happy, striving to help others and make herself a better person. But as her interactions with Steve became a festering sore in the workplace, the gallery owners finally had to talk with her about the tensions he was creating.
“It went on for months and months. It was a cumulative thing,” John said. At the time, he said, “We all really liked Carol. We wished things were working out better, but it seemed like her personal life was becoming too much of a distraction for her to be able to work. It wasn’t like we felt anything negative about her as a person or even as an employee—it was just tumultuous.”
These issues led to her being let go from the gallery in 2007, which was ironic, given that Steve complained she wasn’t working hard enough or earning enough money.
After she died, Carol’s friends could see the spiritual healing she’d attempted to do through her artwork, pouring herself into producing a sizable collection with many, many pieces.
In August 2009, Van Gogh’s Ear held a posthumous opening for her very best work, which hundreds of people attended. Ruth Kennedy and Debbie Wren Hill even flew in from Tennessee for it.
“I think we sold like thirteen thousand dollars that night,” John Lutes said. “That’s a lot for us in Prescott.”
The framed art alone spanned one whole wall, starting from the front window back to the sales desk.
“Art is sort of worthless until someone buys it,” John said. “The most valuable piece of art in our gallery is the one that’s sold.”
In late 2013, when Katherine Morris was in town, she and Joanne Frerking took two of Carol’s unsigned prints and laid them side by side. As they compared their images in grays, burgundy, dark oranges and browns, they interpreted what Carol was trying to express with those forms. And one or both of them exclaimed, “Oh, my God!”
For Joanne these two pieces represented “the story of what Carol hoped would happen” between her and Steve.
It looked as if Carol had used an old X-ray as a stencil, cutting out two shapes: one appeared more male, and the other more female, but also otherworldly, with an angel-like shape—a round head and wings—that seemed very abstract to Joanne.
Carol had used the stencil to print the shapes once, then turned them over and used them again to make ghost prints, one following the other. In the first print, a heavy line connected the two. Their interpretations varied: Joanne saw the line as an arrow, while Katherine saw it as a phallic connection, or a link between their cores—a thread that extended from the angel’s heart toward the male figure’s center and his genitals. The male figure looked athletic to Katherine, and was leaning in a seductive stance against a shape that looked like a surfboard or warrior’s shield.
In the second print Carol created two versions of each figure, one dominant and one ghost. The ghost male figure was right side up, while its darker dominant twin was flipped and heading down, as if subdued or dead. The ghost angel was right side up, and its dominant twin floated above, wings extended.
“In the first one—she was, like, stabbing at him, the part of him that was so awful to her, the sexual part, the addictions and women,” Joanne said. “In the next one he was vanquished and she was floating up—her spirit—she was free. It was angel-like.”
Judging by the second print, Katherine felt that Carol “was ready to leave that earthly body. She was so evolved. She was ready and she just went,” ascending to heaven even stronger than she was on earth.
“That’s like the good and evil, the good prevailing up to the heavens, and the dark part of your stuff you don’t ever work through, it just pulls you down and you don’t get to experience the other realm,” she said.
Another more literal interpretation could be that Carol was portraying Steve killing her or her spirit, then sending her up to heaven.
The gallery was still selling Carol’s art in 2014, with a tribute to her memory on the wall.
“We’re down now to sort of the end of the stuff,” Joanne said. “We may have a hundred, maybe seventy-five pieces.... But we truly sold . . . at least one thousand or fifteen hundred pieces. I knew it would be thrown away otherwise and I couldn’t bear that.”