The Understory Painting

Carol Lynn Magai is an emerging artist who lives in New York City. Art is a second career for her. Carol spent 35 years engaged in university teaching and research, with a primary focus on human emotion (cf, Magai and Haviland, The Hidden Genius of Emotion, Cambridge University Press). On retirement she turned to a deeper personal expression of emotion--writing narrative fiction, reengaging with the piano, and painting. She comes from a family with an artistic background; her grandfather designed wrought-iron fireplace andirons, lamps, and objets d’art; a grand-uncle was a lithographer; her father did sketches and cartoons and designed and built stone fireplaces as a hobby. Earlier in life Carol experimented with occasional figurative sketches and portraits in graphite, but took up watercolor painting in earnest four years ago. Although largely self-taught, her two most influential artistic mentors have been Walter Lynn Mosely and Oksana Lerman. She has also taken intensive workshops with Grahame Booth, Eric Wiegardt, Keiko Tanabe, John Skelcher, Kristi Grussendorf, and Loli Dalvaro. Carol is primarily a landscape artist, although her interests and works are wide-ranging across different themes and genres; across all, she tries to draw from, depict, and convey the full panoply of human emotions and moods. Although an urban dweller most of her adult life, Carol was born in the small town of Rutherford, New Jersey and the family later moved to a heavily wooded, semi-rural part of north Jersey. The house—designed and built by her father--was situated along the banks of a freshwater brook and was tucked into the valley of a mountain range that had been home to the Lenape Indians. This early period in life was formative. It gave her a deep appreciation of the beauty of the natural world, and bestowed an abiding comfort with solitude and the reflective life. As such, she developed a keen interest in literature and poetry, and eventually psychology. That said, she was later surprised to learn at age 19, in the course of professing to her family to have discovered a wonderful new poet, William Carlos Williams--the poet-physician from Rutherford, NJ--that he had been her mother’s physician, and that he had delivered her. Many of her landscape watercolor works displayed in the Saatchi gallery were inspired by specific Williams poems, as credited in the artwork.