Daily Inspiration: Meet Carolyn Garay

Today we’d like to introduce you to Carolyn Garay.

Hi Carolyn, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Growing up, I was always a messy art-maker; scribbling on tables, doodling in books, and drawing for days on the holes having, connected 90’s printer paper, stretched out across the floor. Throughout high school, art became even more of a focus, with a bit of gothy, teen angst maximizing the melancholy magic of the drawings. Forlorn fairy figures ended up sketched in the margins of notes, eerie trees twisted, sprouting from ballpoint pen-points onto binders. After high school, I knew I needed to keep creating art, wherever life took me! I went to Eastern Michigan University as an undergrad, where I dual majored in Art and Chemistry, with a math minor. There was no plan…I just liked all the things! Enthusiastic about learning, life drawing courses were a definite highlight, with gestural practices inspiring expressive line and figurative movement that I had previously been too tentative to explore! Though I was perhaps a bit too lackadaisical about getting to any class regularly if it started before noon, I finally graduated! And as one often does when possessing a shiny new BFA…I continued to work as a server in a bar.

Working the day job, exploring freelance art jobs that paid nearly nothing, and making art whenever I could, I realized that I wanted to both evolve further as an artist while becoming qualified to teach college studio art, as some of my undergraduate art professors had been extremely inspirational.

In 2011, I moved to Philadelphia to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art for grad school. It was a very intense, challenging experience, and though a very, very, (I recently looked at my loan balance and think we need another) very questionable financial decision, I learned so incredibly much about art, process, and myself! The professors were brilliant, incredible teachers. I fell in love with oil painting, which will be a life-long exploration. I discovered an enthusiasm for teaching, in T.A.ing figurative undergraduate classes.

Coming back to the Ypsilanti, MI area, I applied to many art adjunct jobs but ultimately ended up teaching younger students at an after-school program focusing on programming skills via video games, game creation, and digital art. It wasn’t “the plan”, but I loved the amazing students! Teaching them from their 6th-grade year through the end of high school, it was so rewarding to see them creatively grow over the years into brilliant artists.

While juggling teaching, school, work, and studio time, I was consistently doing one, lone art fair every summer, since 2011: the Guild’s Ann Arbor Summer Art Fair. Early on I didn’t see art fairs as a potential path for me to survive financially, but I loved to have a large medley of people come and experience my creations in that setting, along with the very wonderful Guild staff, and so I participated each year for the interaction with artists and fairgoers, just trying to break even.

As the years went by, however, I began to realize that this lone, yearly art fair was starting to sneakily, slowly, turn a tidy profit! I had built up a pretty large body of artwork, and was starting to have return patrons! I was getting pretty classy (for me) with my booth display materials, even having saved to acquire the FANCY walls, which aided greatly in the illusion that I MIGHT just have it together. It started to feel ALMOST feasible to explore more of the art fair scene as a potential path. And based on this feeling (cause a feeling is usually the best indicator that it’s time to make a large financial decision…), I bought a hefty, old, beautiful(-to-me) Chevy van, in Jan. 2022, and have been diving into the fair circuit!

As I finish up my 2022 fair season, (17 down, 3 more left to go!), I am saying goodbye to my part-time day job too, at the end of this year. It is full-time art-making and fair traveling, for me, for the first time ever! I am currently plotting my winter mega-art-binge, where I shall hermit up in my studio: painting, drawing, mish-mashing, and also applying for the next round of shows in 2023. I’m considering exploring some new locations, as I’m definitely still learning the lay of the land. But so far, I love it; making things, dragging them around for anyone to see! Creating connections, and inspiring excitement for art, while meeting fabulous artists, interesting humans, and aspiring creatives along the way, who most certainly, in turn, inspire me!

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
My own brain is always thinking up challenges for Carolyn, by Carolyn. I have often been at the root of most of my own obstacles. Some of my not-so-marvelous habits and impulsive choices have caused quite a bit of trouble. Some of my weaknesses make the general logistics of life more difficult than they might be for a less disheveled human. I can be disorganized, my focus may be fleeting or too extreme, procrastination lurks around every unanswered email, every deadline, and then anxiety answers when I call to on myself to get it together…so, of course: loop and repeat.

Coming to accept myself with enough compassion to keep moving forward, in this sometimes chaotic existence I carve out, WHILE still pushing myself to grow and be better in a healthy way; has been, and may ALWAYS be, a challenge for me. But it is a challenge of self-discovery, and I am ultimately learning to embrace it. Plus, a little chaos, every now and then, fuels my weird creative energies. And I am so excited to keep traveling down my windy, roundabout, inefficient-yet-intriguing path! Especially traveling down it in my new chunky art van (vanity plate: ARTMESS).

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I am a visual artist, who works primarily in 2d – oil painting, drawing, and mixed media. I am an enthusiastic, disheveled creator of mindscapes. I love rainbow colors TOO MUCH to ever mix a reasonable gray, or an accurate beige (even when I want to!! I blame Ms. Frank and her 90s trapper keepers for being too fabulous during some of my very formative years…). I’m an impatient artist that HATES the fact that I LOVE doing obsessive detail, though I also kinda love embarking on things I hate to love… agitated catharsis may exist when indulging the obsessive.

In my work, inner worlds manifest through figurative narrative, improvisational oil exploration, agitated, accumulating pen scribbles, & bright color: reimagining existence as it shapes self, nature, and connection. My work may often explore the more ominous pools of consciousness, and, with slightly twisted playfulness, the guilty satisfaction that can come from immersion into their depths.

Paint physicality drives my more impulsive exploration of expression and texture, though interpreting the observed natural world through my mind’s eye is also endlessly inspiring. Ahhhh, we have such an INSANELY interesting, beautiful, terrifying, disgusting, weird, wild, wonderful natural world! My work may be a product of too much, all the time. Rhythmic patterns and replicated inhabitants may personify conflicting selves, cycling thoughts, memories, dreams, anxieties, and exhilarations; and sometimes vital natural elements pull focus outside of the self, revealing the connection between interior and exterior, all a buzz with the same fundamental energies of existence.

And amongst all the half-finished paintings and doodle masses, I will always be sketching us, humans, from life.

Drawing from an intriguing face, as thoughts are thinking right behind the eyes, that will forever be fabulous. I probably want to draw your face. Everything I create also has something about it, or in it, or behind it, or hidden under it, or spilled onto it that makes me laugh. That is a very important part.

Besides my 2-D creations, I also periodically make ridiculously cheesy, (hopefully) enjoyable youtube videos about my artistic process, in the hopes of getting others excited to embark on their own creative explorations in paint! I want anyone and everyone, of all experience levels, to feel ok about pushing their creative boundaries, and never be scared to make some interesting mishaps!

My videos (of which there are only a few, but I hope to remedy that over time) are a mish-mash of painting time-lapses, terrible cartoons, some light lessons, and my disjointed rambling about my creative process (and many oops-moments that may lead to moments of revelation!

Happy little accidents! <—credit to Bob. Thanks, Mr. Ross.). I probably only have 102 subscribers to my youtube, and I have a sneaking suspicion that about half of my very meager view count is my amazing sister and best friends just watching on repeat….but even so, I am proud of a few of these silly videos, for some strange reason. I’ll try to make more to hopefully spread some enthusiasm for messy, gooey paint exploration, whenever life allows!

So maybe we end by discussing what matters most to you and why?
I want to continue to learn and grow as an artist, bringing my creative process to the MOST EVOLVED, EPIC STATE POSSIBLE for me, in this short life, while at the same time hopefully inspiring others to create by sharing my work and my honest story of whatever I discover along the way! When someone connects to my art, or I in turn feel something when looking at another’s creation, it is a piece of mind that we are sharing across that connection! There is something beautiful and extraordinary about the connections forged across our mind worlds! We, humans, are these isolated worlds inside our own heads; we can never truly exist outside our own perspective, as our existence and experience IS all created in our minds, which only have themselves through which to experience. Yet, in sharing music, stories, and art – we are always trying to share our minds and absorb the mind-makings of others! We are ALWAYS TRYING to understand and relate to experiences happening to a friend, whose mind is another world entirely.

Though we are each a world apart, we humans are connected in our seeking of connection. We are all so different, yet somehow, everyone across the world can look up at the vast night sky and feel fear and awe, feel the weight and exhilaration of being so small, yet a part of something infinite. I want to create art that inspires an understanding of these feelings; the strange beauty of what it is to be this mortal finite body with these infinite worlds inside our heads, in an infinite universe. I want to continue to evolve and develop, grow and create in a way that I can reach for that feeling in my work of reaching outside ourselves to the forever out of reach. I want to make something that embodies most closely my inner world as I see it, that embodies the experiences, the loved ones I’ve lost, the tragedy, the hope, hilarity, and nonsense, and the elusive truth of this crazy world.

I haven’t yet achieved this; I’m still discovering what I mean by this (as I’m sure anyone who tried to read my ridiculous sentences can tell), but I think everything is building towards the ultimate accumulation. I don’t know if I ever WILL create something that embodies everything I wish to make, but the journey and the reaching, the seeking and evolving – THESE may be the most important thing of all!

And if I can inspire other people to create, or if they feel something when observing my creations and they gain some insight from the artistic process, all my learning, failures, growth, weird roundabout discoveries…then it’s all worth it. We’ve shared a piece of mind, and that may be the purpose of EVERYTHING!

Well, It’s at least pretty cool.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.carolyngaray.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/disheveledartmess/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RottingRainbows
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/disheveledartmess