Carole Caroompas, an artist and widely admired teacher whose work encompassed painting, drawing, collage, prints and performance, died on July 30, 2022.

In 2007, Western Project, which represented Carole for many years, published a catalog in which various artists, including Alexis Smith, Mike Kelley, Roy Dowell, Paul McCarthy and Karen Carson, paid tribute to Carole’s work and her influence on other artists. 

Here is what I wrote for that catalog:

Carole’s paintings are a synthesis of contradictory elements, a fusion of high intellect and low culture. A dialogue is forged between the ephemeral – film stills from the 1950s and 1960s, rock musicians of the 1970s and 1980s, psychedelic posters, kitchen kitsch – and the eternally recurring: longing, dissolution, security, ecstasy, death. Each side contributes to this conversation raucously but without drowning out the other voice; and at unexpected moments, the conversation can take a turn for the tender.

If these paintings had an aroma, it would be the combined scents of ancient libraries and rock clubs at 1 am. They are not ingratiating, though they are beautiful – they are made in a painterly syntax that is by turns rough, nuanced, complexly layered, blunt, carefully adjusted. These paintings do not suffer fools easily. The symbolic language is idiosyncratic, demanding slow reading, and frantic zigzagging patterns disrupt the eye’s easy movement across the surface. The brushwork is variously knotted, rubbed and scraped. These are not works that pluck at your sleeve and plead with you to like them. But after spending some time looking at them, you won’t be able to get them out of your mind. They are like nothing else.

Carole’s work was honored with many awards, including the Guggenheim, a Gottlieb award, two NEA awards, a California Community Foundation Fellowship and a COLA grant.  She had a long exhibition history, beginning in 1972, and her work was included in many public and private collections. Her art was examined in two mid-career surveys: 1983 at Cal State Northridge, and 1998 at Otis, where she was a beloved teacher for many years. 

Carole Caroompas in 1983, Photo by Michael Kurcfeld

But this dry recitation of facts does not catch what was so marvelous about Carole. She was a complex amalgamation of the cantankerous and the lovable. As Cliff Benjamin, her long-time dealer and close friend said, “She dared to live as she desired.” Her appearance was striking: Ava Gardner wearing a Cramps t-shirt, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. She was deeply loyal, fierce in her opinions, generous in her studio visits, convinced that every man was in love with her (and much of the time she was right). She had a wonderful sense of humor and took teasing well, dishing it right back out. No one could match her personal style, either artistically or in terms of self-presentation. She was sui generis and leaves a great vacancy in the artistic community.