Carole Wade

After eighteen years of comfort within a settled style, Carole Wade used the pandemic-era pause to take her practice apart and rebuild it. She started with color theory — emphasizing clear light-and-dark values and the harmony of a deliberately limited palette — then moved into a two-year stretch of purely abstract work for the personal freedom it allowed. Her subjects began calling her back: a sense of place, the local imagery she has long known, the human figures she keeps returning to. The work now in the gallery is the result of that round trip — familiar subjects rendered with a more direct, simplified language.

Wade works in acrylic on cradled panel, building shape against shape, value against value. Tree forms in particular are something she has spoken about with affection: "the tree shapes are abstract paintings themselves," she has said. The simplification is the point — what falls away in the new language is the busyness, what remains is the structure of the place.