Carol Graham PPRUA
Carol was born in Belfast and moved to Ballymena in the early 60′s. She was educated in Cambridge House Grammar School for Girls and Belfast College of Art.
Upon graduating in 1975, Carol set up a studio as a full-time professional artist. Exhibitions in Belfast and Dublin followed and it wasn’t long before the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Ulster Museum commissioned and bought her work.
Carol first came to public attention as a young artist after painting The Striped Skirt. Famous for its photo-realistic technique, the piece took months to complete. It’s now in the Ulster Museum’s collection.
Her dazzling ability in the photo-realism style earned Carol a reputation as one of Ireland’s finest young artists. After the museum bought her Light Falls Within the BBC made her the subject of a programme about gifted ‘young contenders’ tipped for success. Another of the contenders was a then promising actor named Liam Neeson.
By 1980 Carol had received both a bursary and the prestigious Major Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, had exhibited in the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, and the Royal Ulster Academy, Belfast, and had sold to private collectors and organisations such as Ulster Television.
In the 1980s she consolidated her status through solo exhibitions. There was an Arts Council of Northern Ireland two-person exhibition with Basil Blackshaw, regarded as one of Ireland’s finest contemporary artists, and shows in Ireland, England and America. There was also a solo exhibition at the prestigious Tom Caldwell Gallery, which has shown just about every major Irish artist of the twentieth century.
In 1985 (and again in 1996) Carol won the gold medal at the Royal Ulster Academy. In this period she was also capturing the attention from esteemed artists such as Colin Middleton MBE, who commented that her Waterhorse ‘was almost a masterpiece.’
Throughout the 1980s Carol continued to explore and extend her work, particularly into portraiture. She received regular high-profile portrait commissions, her sitters including the likes of internationally renowned flautist Sir James Galway and Dixie Gilmore OBE, Lord Mayor of Belfast.
In the 1990s, influenced by a reactive depression to a personal crisis, the artist’s work took new direction. Carol turned to experimental abstract images and to high mountain landscapes, drawn from experiences of lone walking expeditions in winter in the Mourne Mountains.
Public reaction to the landscape work, still in a photo-realist style, was undeniable – she sold out a Tom Caldwell Gallery solo exhibition in 1996. But great personal and critical acclaim also followed for the powerful images arising from the artist’s explorations of her emotional and spiritual inner journey.
A major 1999 exhibition of over 50 pieces of this metaphorically autobiographical work, entitled Into the Darkness, showed in both Belfast and Dublin. Another solo exhibition, Spirit Magenta, combining realism, metaphor and abstraction, drew similar positive responses in 2001.
In 2003, the Royal Ulster Academy elected Carol as President, an honour in Northern Ireland’s visual art world. She guided the academy through the museum’s difficult period of closure for refurbishment by very successfully arranging two academy annual exhibitions at the Ormeau Baths Gallery. The noughties decade also brought a major Mid-Career Review solo exhibition.
Today Carol continues to express her artistry in a wide range of subject matter and breadth of scale, mostly in oils, her preferred medium. Her current interests are in landscapes and seascapes in unusual light, commissioned portraits and a continuation of her abstract-symbolic work.