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CAROL SHUMAS
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E
very painting of mine is a stage with characters," says Carol Shumas. The West Vancouver-based artist is so captivated by theatre, particularly musicals, that plays have become not just a metaphor for her own creative endeavors but actually figure into her artistic style. Each of Shumas’ paintings looks like a freeze frame of the moment a play reaches its pinnacle.
Her chosen subject matters are major events in life that would undoubtedly draw a crowd of spectators. Whether depicting a wedding, a dance, a boxing match, or a concert, Shumas creates a stage, sometimes real and sometimes metaphorical, for her central characters and fills the edges of her work with onlookers. Like “Hamlet,” her paintings are almost like plays within plays: her creations show scenes involving an audience, while simultaneously engrossing real, live viewers that desire to examine her artwork.
Like a playwright, Shumas creates characters that come to life on her canvas. Given that her painting style has a folk vibe to it, her portraits are simplistic in form yet complex in meaning. Each work depicts a cast of characters. Inevitably, the viewer
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will be drawn in to peer closer at the individuals that make up the crowd and will realize that each one has a distinct personality. Their physical traits, facial expressions, and costumes are painted with the same degree of intensity by the painter yet each detail is personal to the characters depicted.
Carol Shumas’ palette is bursting with passionate reds, soulful blues, and heart-warming yellows. It’s as if each color coveys a part of the overall story Shumas is telling in her paintings. Like a kid with a new box of crayons, she eagerly uses all of the colors in a single painting. She doesn’t confine certain colors to certain quadrants, but rather makes use of all the colors with bright patches throughout the entire canvas. Even the sky, relegated to blue in most works, will sometimes appear red and orange and other times blue and yellow. The strong use of colors brings vibrancy to her work. It sets the scene for a work that entrances the viewer.
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