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Carol Montgomery

High Imagination
(or, Paints + Prints + Portraits + Poems = Phun!)
by Eva Poole-Gilson

            Carol Montgomery, lives in Bishop and teaches for Cerro Coso College and for the Owens Valley/Paiute Education Center. Carol recently displayed work in the California Society of Printmakers’ Exhibition in Oakland during August 2006. She has B.A. degrees in Painting and in French from the University of Montana, an M.F.A. in Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a Credential for teaching art in secondary schools.

            Impressive!

            It is, but Carol has retained the playful spirit of a child despite all that formal education!

She remains in love with the rainbow, with reds of every hue, with the green-blues of all the world’s seas; she’s stayed stubbornly fascinated by found objects who’ve long since misplaced their names, by fabrics that feel rough and warm like childhood blankets, by shiny gold and silver powders. Somehow she’s still that little girl you imagine hiding in a make-shift tent under the piano on a rainy day, dreaming up stories about animals and people, watching them change into the made-up characters of intriguing new myths.

            But now—because of all that learning—Carol has the skill to make those fabulous creatures metamorphose through painting and writing and printmaking so that we, the audience, can not just peek at her artistic world, but can also visit it, and marvel over its meaning, and beauty, even as she does.

            Because her colors dance. And so do the hummingbirds, the cats, the moths, the monsters. Even the mythic humanoids can’t seem to keep their feet or feathers in the frame. It’s as if they are all exploring their environment to find how deeply they can dig into it, or how hard and how far they can push out of it.

            Carol Montgomery’s artistic subjects mirror the way she uses her own imagination: she too presses and pulls, melts and manipulates her media, shoves the edges of the known methods of painting and printmaking to the limits.

            When you say “prints,” people think of photos, or a series of limited edition images, maybe numbered from 1 through 200, each image the same. That’s not what we’re talking about. Carol’s prints are usually one of a kind, a kind of  “artist proof” or, in effect, a print done in layers, each layer impossible to recreate with exactitude (which Carol probably wouldn’t want to do if she could). She describes one of her large prints, Dangerous Hummingbird – Blue, as two collograph plates (collage-type layers) of cardboard, paper, and glue; a ground acid-etched plate; and a Plexiglas plate. Each plate carries a different color which is transferred to paper (Fabriano Tiepolo, imported from Milan) by the action of being squeezed between the rollers of a flatbed etching press.

It took her six hours for the printing, alone, of this piece!

“My latest print work is based upon hummingbird moths,” Carol explains. “They’re members of the Sphinx family or Sphingidae, quite large. They hover and dart, and with their large proboscis suck nectar from flowers just like hummingbirds. I had planted wildflower seeds in a patch in my garden; some of them grew into large stalks with yellow trumpet flowers that opened only at dusk every night late summer. As the flowers slowly opened, a flock of these moths would come to drink from their chalices. In the low light they seemed iridescent. It’s amazing the parallel tracks nature travels that produce similar forms: as my husband and I were hiking in the Eastern Sierra at the 10,000-foot level, I saw one of these moths investigating the lupines in a meadow!”

What about her paintings?

“I have always been drawn to different painting techniques. My paintings in this show are done in a combination of transparent and opaque media. Some I started on watercolor paper, underpainting in watercolor and graphite. Then I mounted the paper on board, painting in encaustic on top. Encaustic uses wax as a binder with linseed oil and pigments. I heat this mixture up in an old electric skillet. I have to apply the paint very fast as it solidifies on the brush as I am working. To finish the painting I pass a heat lamp over it to fuse the layers of paint. This produces interesting translucent effects as some of the underpainting comes up through the overpainting.”

Carol’s “artist books”—two can be seen at her Bishop show—combine her artistic interests in painting, printmaking, and writing, and they’re based on animal stories. “One of my first was inspired by a poem of Jacques Prevert (1900-1977) called Chanson des escargots qui vont a l’enterrement; it’s the story of two snails who go to the funeral of a dead leaf. I keep going back to those snails…. The animal stories often have a moral at the end. The snails came back around to spring and summer and the eternal round of life…. What do these animal stories mean to me? Like artists and storytellers of long ago they clothe themselves in the garments of human beings—their emotions, actions, regrets—all the detritus of life.”