As Smoke Loses Itself in Air – Caroline Coolidge

Caroline Coolidge presents a new series of paintings that center on the technique of sfumato. Through abstraction, she explores blurred realities, memory, and perception.

Visitors are welcome to stop by on Friday 5 September (6pm-8pm) for the exhibition’s opening event at Patriothall.

The blur, as first understood through the lens of European Renaissance painting techniques, is the starting point for Caroline Coolidge’s most recent body of work. She begins with “A Treatise on Painting” by Leonardo da Vinci, which describes how to effectively paint light and shadow by utilizing the technique of sfumato. In this manual, Leonardo explained that when two sections of paint meet, the colors should blend “as smoke loses itself in the air.” Coolidge appropriates this phrase and places the blur within our contemporary moment.

By employing this 500-year-old technique, she reinterprets sfumato within her abstract language of the present. Her use of the blur is reminiscent of work created by painters during and after World War II, who sought to bring order to the chaotic world around them. The blurring approach provided a different lens through which to see the world. These two opposing uses of a soft, smoky stroke, which allowed Renaissance painters to enhance reality and the early modernists to obliterate it, create a dynamic tension within her work as she reflects upon the chaotic, dystopian atmosphere of today.

The shapes and forms Coolidge creates are intended to evoke places, figures, and emotions, which are filtered and screened. Some become distant and unstable memories, and others become overtly sensitized. All reflect upon what a painting is and how the truth of the materials intersects with the reality of its environment. There is a surrealist element to Coolidge’s paintings, which at once recalls natural forms and also digitized imagery, juxtaposing the two. Coolidge’s paintings remind us that the world is a place of great multiplicity. A unified viewpoint no longer exists. It is hard to discern what is real and what is not. We are all left with an inward search for these answers, which Coolidge tries to answer in her painting. She does this in color and form, and in the content that emerges for the viewer. This is a new body of work for Coolidge, who developed many of these ideas of disorientation and unravelling while participating in a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in the spring of 2025, later completing the series in her Edinburgh studio.

Caroline Coolidge’s interdisciplinary work has taken her throughout Europe and the United States. She is currently based in Edinburgh, Scotland, and has a studio at Wasps Riverside House. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at venues including Breakers Gallery, London, England; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Dolphin Gallery, St John’s College, Oxford, England; Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh, Scotland; and Fundación Maceta, Mexico City, Mexico. Coolidge has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts, has worked as a teaching assistant in the Art, Film, and Visual Studies department at Harvard University, and has been a Curatorial Research Fellow at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Coolidge completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard College in 2022 and earned an MFA with distinction from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in 2024.