MORE ABOUT CAROLINE

Caroline always tries to avoid questions about where she grew up. Born in Tenn, she started to talk in North Carolina, started school in Illinois and had attended 7 schools by the time she had finished 5th grade. After living in many sections of the country, she found her true home in the Pacific Northwest. Home for the last sixteen years is four acres on a remote island with a view of the sunset across the waters toward Vancouver Island.

First coming to the San Juans to study with Rex Brandt, she found and purchased her piece of the Islands in 1989, then moved up from Oregon in 1992.

Her friend and builder, Jeffrey Unterschuetz, joined her and that first winter. Despite no inside running water or, for a while, no electricity they started building a year-round compound. Jeffrey had taught her to solo sail a small sailboat while they were both in Oregon. It was with this boat she had explored the San Juan Islands and had found her spot on Obstruction. Once he joined her, Jeffrey stayed and, three years later, they were married.
Jeffrey has continued to build a home, studio, shop out buildings, -- as well as a dock for their boats. Most winters they have been the island’s only residents. They cross the water to near-by Orcas where they keep a car and where there are stores, friends and a connection for a ferry to the mainland.

The light on the water, reflections, the patterns of rocks, trees, and the ever changing population of migratory waterfowl are her companions on her commute to Orcas in her Whitehall rowboat - a far different commute than the pressure of clogged freeways. At times a seal or a soaring eagle joins the trip. Caroline’s watercolors reflects the peace and calm one finds in the Islands.

When did she start in watercolors? In a summer class the year she was fifteen. She graduated with honors in Art History from Wellesley College, taught several years of grade school, had three children and gradually became serious about learning watercolor. After a number of years of showing, selling and study with such well-known teachers as Ed Whitney, Rex Brandt, Millard Sheets, and Christopher Schink, she started teaching others watercolor. Despite the shows and sales, her career has been mainly that of an art educator. Teaching brought together her passion for watercolor with her training in teaching and art history. In 1984 she received a masters’ degree in Teaching in Art, from Western Oregon College - specializing in teaching adults. She is a past president of the Watercolor Society of Oregon and she is a Signature Member of the Northwest Watercolor Society.

Caroline has written a number of articles for American Artists Watercolor Magazine and Daniel Smith’s Inksmith. Her article in the Spring ’97 Daniel Smith catalogue presented a new way of layering watercolor by separating them into stains, sedimentary and luminous pigments. Her approach has changed the way many approach their painting in watercolor.

Her paintings are in corporate, private, international and museum collections. She has had many one-woman shows, won numerous awards and is frequently called to judge these exhibitions. In June of ’04, Oregon State University hosted a sixty painting retrospective of her work at he La Sells Stewart in Corvallis. In the winter of ’07, she curated an exhibit of fifty of her students’ work, representing twenty years of workshops she had taught in the San Juan Islands.

From 19982-2000 Caroline led painting trips to the Greek Islands every spring, almost 1000 people total. She also has taught many successful workshops in far-flung places that include Tahiti, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Provence, and England, as well as in many of the states. She welcomes invitational workshops but now limits her “overseas” trips to the San Juan Islands.

She finds many of the same benefits of getting away are there: a lovely boat trip, a change of pace, a beautiful location and the daily cares left behind. Yet the boat trip is only an hour. You arrive without jet lag, and you do you have to deal with a foreign language or currency. While on the islands, you slow down with no speed limits over 40 mph, no traffic lights, no fast-food chains. The Islands are still a world away – a place to center one’s self and focus on one’s art.

Besides being an artist and teacher, Caroline delights in her family, including five grandchildren. The island retreat is a special place to share with the children. They will always have memories of walks in the undisturbed center, finding secret mossy dells. They explore the rocks at low tide, have learned to row, fish, and drive the power boat. They make seaweed salsa. And they have quiet moments in the hammock where they too know the peace of the islands, looking out over the western sea.