Among the themes consistent in my work today is the search for ties to the past. I look for the psychological and emotional conflicts, the complexities and existential traumas with which we struggle. I hope to evoke primitive ritual and classicism, and to express both an empathic and archetypal representation of humanness.

Beauty for me is expressed by texture and layering, by the depth and response to both material and experience. I walk a tightrope between opposites, between primitive and contemporary, crude and sophisticated, between what is fuzzy and what is clear, and what is conscious and what is not.

Carol Setterlund

Born in Eureka, California, Carol Setterlund has lived in Northern California most of her life. The physical influences of the coast and the mountains, the variety and beauty of the landscape, the character of the people in the farm town where she grew up have been her background and continue to inform her art.

Her work borders at times on folk or tribal art but more often on a universal connection to both her heritage and the modern contemporary world.

She currently lives north of San Francisco in Sonoma County.

Most of my latest work is two-dimensional. Although the physical acts of putting paint on a panel or taking a chain saw to a hunk of wood are very different, I approach each with the same hope of spontaneous motion and, therefore, the discovery of something I didn’t know before.