Carolyn Sharon Goodridge, born on October 21, 1960, in Port of Spain, Trinidad, West Indies, immigrated to the U.S. in 1963. She developed an interest in the fine arts at the age of 10, first writing short stories, plays and poems and then expressing herself through songs for the piano and guitar and later focusing on drawing and painting.
Carolyn’s formal art education began in 1986 at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York as a night student in textile design. At FIT she discovered her inexhaustible love of painting. In 1990 she left New York to pursue full time matriculation at the University of Florida. Carolyn was awarded her BFA in Painting from the University of Florida in 1993, and an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1997.
Carolyn’s abstract paintings reflect her progression from realism to abstraction. An avid student of art history, she was inspired by the mystical works of color field artists Mark Tobey, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, the whimsical master colorist Hans Hofmann, the musically oriented, German Expressionist Vassily Kandinsky, the exploratory work on dreams and the collective unconscious by Paul Kleé, and the genius of musician John Cage. Studying their works had a liberating impact on her. She began to realize a freedom and reconnection with her love of color and music, legacies of her West Indian culture. Carolyn has been painting with encaustic (pigmented beeswax) since 2003.
