Carol Bajen-Gahm is an artist from Massachusetts who first came to Newfoundland in 2002 for a painting residency at Pouch Cove. Affected by the light, landscape, and people of Newfoundland, she and her husband bought a house and studio on the ocean in Torbay, just outside the capital city of St. John’s.
Between 2003 and 2006 she attended residencies in Costa Rica, Dorland Mountain in California and the Robert P. MacNamara Residency in Westport Island, Maine. In 2006 she received a Joan Mitchell grant to attend a residency at the Santa Fe Institute of Art. She went back to Costa Rica in January of 2016, and that fall she attended the Two Rooms Residency at Duntara, an outport community on the Bonavista peninsula of Newfoundland.
In 2009, R&F Paints of Kingston, NY, equipped Carol’s studio to teach encaustic painting. Carol then became an R&F at-large instructor, presenting encaustic workshops at her Torbay Bight Studio.
Carol has a master’s degree in jazz composition from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and has created installations combining the mediums of music and art. She now concentrates on her abstract oil and mixed media works which explore the effects of nature, place and time on the inner and outer landscape. She likes to investigate dark spaces, tangled areas, time shifts and spatial juxtapositions in her work.
Nature inspires her as she works with its raw power and fierce beauty to create an environment for her work. The constant changes of light and weather that engulf her in her shoreside studio have aways been a part of her paintings, but now she is inviting nature to physically join in the dance, using materials not necessarily considered beautiful to make layers that end up as interesting textures, to create an atmosphere that comes together and breathes together.
The musician John Cage would use readings from the I Ching to determine what notes he would use in a composition to “let the sounds be themselves”. That same sense of chance plays a large part in her practice.
Her paintings have been exhibited in Newfoundland and the Toronto Art Fair, represented by the Christina Parker Gallery. She is also represented by the Sivarulrasa Gallery in Almonte, Ontario. Her works are exhibited and collected internationally.
In 2019 Komatik Press published a book entitled A Nurturing Darkness, celebrating Carol Bajen-Gahm’s meditations on the root cellars of Newfoundland, with a commentary by Emily Deming. The book was part of Komatik Press’s Artist Series. It was an Editor’s pick in the spring edition of Atlantic Books Today. It is available on Amazon, or you can download it here as a PDF.