Every Act a Benediction
A Conversation with Carol Anthony
By Linda Mason Hunter
© Linda Mason Hunter, 2007; May not be reprinted without written permission from the author.

"She did not plan. She merely let herself go and the overwhelming life in her did the rest. It is only when youth is gone and experience has given us a sort of cheap courage that most of us realize how simple such things are."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald

Carol painting
Photo: Peter Vitale

In her life, as in her art, Carol Anthony is both painterly and poetic. She is blessed with strong inner light and a sensibility to see the sacred in the every day—cracked crockery bowls, tables dressed in white cloth, well-worn paths. After 30 years of making art she is now celebrated nationally, mostly for her hauntingly beautiful paintings rendered in oil pastel, layer upon layer of color burnished with the warmth of her fingertips. Whether on gessoed board, cigar boxes, or paper, her paintings glow with a luminosity both mystical and reverent, revealing a keen spirituality at work.

She has never married, preferring her own path in pursuit of “a higher consciousness of choice.” She lives for her painting. Always has. In order to live her life’s poetry she created an architectural fantasy for herself near Santa Fe, New Mexico—a slice of the seventeenth century frozen in time. Her five acres of pinon-studded desert is both a cosmos and a comfort. Here she lives completely in the moment, in stillness and domesticity, relishing joy and wonder, silence and intimacy, and “celebrating all the in-betweens.”

Just Carol

A tall, pencil-thin woman nearing sixty, Carol keeps her chestnut hair long, sometimes brushed to an ethereal sheen falling over her shoulders, sometimes woven in a knot upon her head. She is most at home in faded jeans, a t-shirt or sweater, and scuffed cowboy boots, a paint-splattered apron wrapped twice around her waist. A careful gypsy, silver rings on her fingers, a jangle of bracelets on her wrists. 

To stay centered in her poetic approach to life Carol spends inordinate time alone, choosing her friends carefully and jealously guarding her privacy. Her family consists of a group of artists, mostly women, who gather to celebrate the rituals of everyday life, meeting over steaming home-cooked food, the celebratory toast, the sharing of gifts. She begins each day with prayer and lights candles as invocations. She almost unconsciously shuns the mundane. You won’t find her in a shopping mall, in tennis shoes, or (god forbid!) in a baseball cap. She shops for groceries at family-owned markets and frequents little-known restaurants.

She is generous to a fault with her friends and her passions. Her main charity, rescuing abused dogs, sometimes borders on obsession. At any given day four to eight barking dogs greet visitors to her remote cloister. Errant dog hairs found clinging to her paintings bring her joy.

“Dogs are my children, my best friends. They inform us like no other form of love or dialogue.”

Ironically, though she thrives in domesticity she travels often, always toting her portable studio, usually a companion or two by her side. Ireland, Mexico, Greece, Italy, oceanside spots in the U.S. are favorite destinations.

Carol embraces a clarity and simplicity that only comes from sensitivity, a trait she’s nurtured since childhood. But since the death of her twin sister Elaine (also an artist) in 1996, Carol has grown in maturity. Through crisis, trauma, and joy she says she has discovered secret knowledge: “In quiet is resurrection, being aligned to my own silence in the conversation that surrounds mother, daughter, sister.” A dark light infuses her current work reflecting sadness and loneliness, but also deep joy in “the capacity to be touched by the unknown—and be spared.”

Her History

Born in New York City in 1943, Carol is the second and middle child of Elaine Carol and Jack Murray Anthony. Her mother bestowed her name on each of her twins—Elaine for the first, Carol for the second, born 23 minutes apart. Their father was Creative Vice President for Young and Rubicam advertising agency, and before that a cartoon contributor to The New Yorker, Colliers, and Punch magazines in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. Her mother came from a musical family in nearby Bronxville and sang in a trio with her sisters.

“It was a wonderful way to grow up, surrounded by all that craziness of artists—music, spontaneity, characters dropping by at all hours.”

The young family lived in New York City until 1944, when they moved to Connecticut, a “Hansel and Gretel-like gatehouse” in the middle of an apple orchard on an old Greenwich estate, where brother Jay was born. It is this cottage Carol remembers as home. In those Eisenhower years television wasn’t a big part of their lives. The girls climbed trees, built forts, slid down hills, sang and danced, learning songs from all the Broadway hits.

“We had cats, birds, flowers, and bicycles. As I got older I appreciated the support, humor, and love of that whole rich life that not many children experience.”

Carol, Elaine, and Jay frequently accompanied their parents into New York City for cultural events. At family gatherings the children formed a trio--Elaine on piano, Carol cello, and Jay violin, and often performed with their Uncle Ken (a New York City jazz musician).

But it was the childhood immersion in the wry, sophisticated world of The New Yorker that molded the psyche of each of the Anthony children, and developed their artistic talents. Known for his hilarious, off the wall humor, Jack Anthony holds a special spot in America’s journalism history. He is credited with introducing the cartoon into advertising. Before that cartoons were relegated to The New Yorker and newspapers.

Same Egg Twins

As little children the twins dressed alike, sounded alike,and were hard to tell apart. Best friends and inseparable sisters, they never doubted that they were artists. Both started drawing at age two and drew all the time, sketching each other and their father as they sat by his side in the evening while he did his layouts. He shared his India inks, pens, pencils, and sense of humor, giving his daughters tips in technique, patience, and silence. Carol believes she takes after him.

Carol's big egg painting

Photo by Peter Vitale

“Dad ran away from his home when he was 18.  I, too, ran away--from society’s gridlock--at an early age.”

In the mid-1950s, the family idyll started to sour. Carol’s mother (a singer) learned she had myasthenia gravis, atrophy of the throat muscle so she could not swallow. For four years her children helped care for her. Carol’s “Twin Bed Series,” painted in 1993, recalls this time in her life.

“The beds—in quiet, simple rooms—are symbols of comfort and shelter where Elaine and I, in our later childhood, shared sadness and courage during the difficult early years when our mother was dying. These nostalgic, cozy beds became our symbol of safe haven and night refuge where we sang and talked, laughed and cried. Here, in those lonely and thoughtful growing teen years, we both became deeply bonded and dependent on each other.”

After their mother died, the 15-year-old twins attended boarding school in Northampton, Massachusetts, where they became involved in a whole other world of friendship, art, sports, music, and the excitement of a university town widening the scope of their horizons.

“I loved prep school. For us it became a home base from which we could get a perspective on ourselves and on our dad and brother as family now.”

Carol describes her teen years as thoughtful and survival-ready.

“I knew at 16 I did not need to get married and have children. It came to me in a dream. I started reading Anais Nin, Ayn Rand, and Isak Dinesan, and appreciated Gloria Steinem. I wasn’t buying into what the culture wanted me to be.”

Carol feels comfortable with her two abortions. The first, over a shoe shop in Puerto Rico when she was 16 (before the advent of birth control pills), she describes as a painful but courageous experience, absolutely safe, costing $800.

“I fell in love for a few minutes with a beautiful man.”

In 1970 her testimony before the New York legislature helped legalize abortion in that state.

At Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), their personalities blossomed. A fellow student recalls the girls looked almost exactly alike, choosing similar words in conversation, speaking in the same low breathy voice, and dressing in loose-fitting bohemian clothes—gauzy shirts, long skirts, open sandals. Together they bought a Harley Davidson motorcycle and made frequent trips to the countryside to paint. But they weren’t exactly alike. Elaine, the older, was more culturally conservative; she yearned for a husband a family.

Elaine's gown

Photo: Peter Vitale

Individual choices separated the two girls in their early twenties. Elaine turned down a coveted European scholarship in order to marry a Spanish architecture student who would have been drafted into the Vietnam War if he remained single. Carol moved to her father’s flat in Greenwich Village, and got a job with an advertising agency.

“I always knew I wouldn’t be good at partnership. I wouldn’t be true, and I couldn’t handle compromise or a wifely role.”

When Jack Anthony died in 1967, it was a tremendous trauma. Carol immediately embarked on a six month self-imposed sabbatical in Europe, promptly and purposefully getting lost.

“In that period I got in touch with the pain, loneliness, and sadness I obviously felt all those years caring for Mom, then Dad. I became aware of the denial I had closeted and escaped into years before.”

Moved by the scars of war, the landscapes, and the ancient history, she wrote in her journal: “I love everything broken, for it is when they are broken and embattled that we often discover the true mettle of a person, the true resonance of a place…old rooms, Pompeiian walls, statues without limbs.”

Elaine moved to Mexico City with her husband and started a family. Carol pursued a career, remaining alone, but never lonely.

“I’ve always wanted the other life, of being a  gentle rebel. For me, the word ‘cloister’ has always had special significance, probably because I have had to enclose my life in a certain singleness of purpose.  I chose to live alone, with a European countenance of garden and quiet. And for whatever reason the paintings had to be done alone.”

Twelve years later Elaine was diagnosed with breast cancer. After a heroic battle, she died in 1996, leaving Carol to spend hours ruminating over the meaning of life, death, love, and dying.

 “The privilege of helping her to die, I changed in one week what I’ve been all my life.”

Though their paths diverged, and their influences and mediums differed, the subject matter of their art remained the same. They each painted a sacred inner life--alters, rituals, silent reverent places--reusing old and salvaged things. But where Carol painted a kind of visual reality, Elaine’s work was a more abstract, yet powerful depiction of a sacred inner life.

Her Art

Carol made a name for herself in the 1970s sculpting three-dimensional figures from linen mache. Her captivating life-sized figures (prim parlor maids, dotty dowagers, pompous lions of industry, bratty kids) represent the humanity in us all. These droll satirical pieces look like they’ve sprung from the pages of a Cheever novel, uncannily resembling the droll vignettes her father drew for The New Yorker.

“They were a tribute to my dad, and they were a tribute to cartoons, and they were a tribute to the way I felt about people…Dad always taught us that no one person is any better than another, that a plumber is no different from a president of a company, and I think my figures were a celebration and a reverent thank you to Dad for that.”

In 1978 she abandoned sculpture for the deeper, more intimate scale of painting choosing the inner landscape as her subject. Her whispering images, devoid of people, probe life’s imponderables. She blends and blurs her colors, layer upon layer, creating a poignant unearthly light.

Novelist Reynolds Price, who owns a few of her paintings, writes that Carol’s paintings reveal "a burningly intense sense of connection between a single human being and what [she] perceives as transcendental...Nature, God, the gods, and physical reality from oceans and trees to eggshells and kitchen cups...[Such  paintings] convince us that individual human life, as Wordsworth says, ‘is greater than we know.’”

She paints domestic still lifes filled with promise—fecund pears, luminous eggs, linen covered tables—everything with the rich patina of age and wear.

Her visionary dreamscapes possess a solitude verging on melancholy—disappearing dusty trails, beachheads where the sea kisses the land, ancient ruins holding past secrets, fiery pinons in the glow of a New Mexico sunset, fairytale stilt houses rising from a pearly mist.

She paints inner rooms--intimate corners pierced by a shaft of light, a spare room with a small note tacked on the wall, ladders ascending towards the light—interiors waiting for someone to enter, empty but for a shimmering dance of atoms.

“The rooms represent mystery and enigma and those worlds between waking and dreamtime.”

In the process of creation all her art becomes metaphorical. Her pears become sensual celebrations, often bruised with scars. Her eggs glow with the possibility of new beginning. Symbols arise out of shadows. Windows and shafts of light are the quickening of the soul, becoming avenues of entrance and exit.

On the Bookshelf

Carol devours books with enviable rapidity. Still, one is her favorite: Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainier Maria Rilke.

 “It is my bible. He created a world of word in poetry that helped me inside to find courage and strength. ‘Your solitude will be a home and hold for you even amid unfamiliar conditions and from there you will find your ways.’”

Her Philosophy

For Carol Anthony life and art are one. Studio and home are one. Feeding her dogs, feeding the birds, creating a home for herself in the Southwest desert is all one. Nothing is taken for granted.

“It's all one with living and being.”

Home is all important.

“… it is a form of magic embracing the art that is every day.”

Because painting is the one constant in her life, all activities of daily maintenance revolve around it.

"Painting is soul. Home is soul.”

Home is where she gets her inspiration.

"I get ideas for painting by looking into the icebox a lot. I know the idea isn't necessarily found there, but the icebox for me is a metaphor for home, chicken soup, and Mother. I open it and it contains all the special bits on the side door I save so I can eat cocktail onions at ten in the morning.”

Trying to be fully conscious of each moment is the core of her philosophy. Care and mindfulness in every choice--what you say, what you think, where you step, how you step.

“When life becomes this meaningful something wonderful happens. Every act of domesticity--from washing a bowl to sweeping a floor to placing fresh flowers in a vase--not only bequeaths a benediction, the act itself is a benediction!”

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