Imagining the Soul: the Art and Life of Carol Scott

A night heron stalks the blue edge of a swimming pool. A pink bunny beats its drum. Above you the pantheon lifts its swollen concrete head and an ice storm swirls itself to crystalline fury and a recumbent nude, red heels on her feet and a red silk ribbon at her throat, smiles at you from the shade of a burning hibiscus. A woman in a wicker chair gazes at you, smiling at the secret which is you, the you that you yourself have not yet come to understand but whose hidden form your unlooked-for appearance has somehow intimated to her. 

She is Carol Scott, the woman who gazes at you from the painting on the wall above you and the one who stands before you, martini glass in hand, face turned slightly upward to peer at you with the same pleased, slightly amused expression which is, like her art, both a gift and a practice.

You have found yourself at one of Carol’s house parties. Perhaps one of her friends has invited you. Perhaps you seem merely to have arrived there, borne on the current of some obscure centripety which feels at first like fate and comes to be seen as providence. In the dizzying array of guests you are at one moment speaking with a celebrated novelist, at another with a Thomistic philosopher, then with a poet, or a librarian, or a sound engineer. You do not know this in the moment. You are merely enjoying the conversation, enjoying it more freely as the Prosecco sets in. But it is not the Prosecco that is the enjoyment but rather the realization that here is the thing you have been seeking, the company of artists, the passionate, earnest engagement with the world which has from early youth suggested itself as avatar and end of human creativity. There are paintings on every wall, paintings leaning against couches, paintings worked upon the seats of chairs. There are paintings hung from every available section of the ceiling.

Take a moment to eat. Have you ever seen so much smoked salmon in one place? And have you tried the tabbouleh? It’s delicious. One of Carol’s specialties. But this is all too much. Step outside for a moment. Take a stroll along the pool’s edge and ponder the sculptures at its far end, where the light of the house fades against the shaded darkness of the yard. On your left hand is a Crucifixion, nearly life-sized but worn like an artifact of disaster. And so it is, having been damaged during Hurricane Ida. On your right is a twisted form like one of the harpoons Captain Ahab says are turned like corkscrews into Moby Dick’s mountainous hump. The summer’s heat begins to tell, and the mosquitoes have struck up their humming advance. You retreat to the cool prismatic sanctum of the home, and a friend beckons you upstairs. You tour the hallway and the bedrooms, encountering at every turn such bursts of color as carried Nick Carraway through the Trimalchian halls of Jay Gatsby. And at last you reach the studio, which is also the bedroom, its ceiling sweeping up to a row of black skylights. You stand a moment at the easel, where a crystal cake dish is sparkling into view as if by magic. Then you step into the elevator, make your descent, and rejoin the party. Carol is smiling at you. 

Carol’s art eludes any easy description. To encounter it is to know that strange exhilaration of stepping through an overlooked door on a familiar street and into a world vertiginous, enchanting, alive to the ceaseless throb of wonder. By turns jocund, searing, and prayerful, the work evinces a contemplative vision shot through with all the colors and shades of feeling known to the eyes of childhood. Playfully fluent in the tradition, it nonetheless eludes all facile comparison. Like all great art, it somehow leaves you less certain of your way of being in the world, even as it gives you back a part of yourself you hadn’t yet known to look for.

Then, too, Carol herself defies any easy categorization. She is a painter, yes, and one of singular drive and vision. But she is also a sculptor, or at least began her career as one, having studied under the great Angela Gregory. She is a poet, collaborating with Caitlin Smith Gilson on such collections as Rhapsody and Redolence: The Crystal Decade (Cascade Books, 2024). And her performance of “Musetta’s Waltz,” from Puccini’s La Bohème, won her a scholarship to LSU, which she declined, as she didn’t read music and found the whole thing absurd.

As even so brief a listing of her artistic output suggests, Carol does not believe, to use her words, in economy of anything. So exuberant are her forays into the realm of beauty that her very home has become a kind of Aladdin’s cave—or Plato’s—where the images on the walls are no mere facsimiles or shadows but convey to us that sublime vision, that rush of wonder edged in fear, which Emerson urged upon the consciousness of all who would be philosophers.

So abundant are her works as to recall the frenetic labors of a Dali or Picasso. One half expects Carol to pick up the dinner rolls and begin sculpting animals of them. Her soul knows that need to give birth in beauty which Plato so stirringly describes in his Symposium.

Yet Carol’s work, complex and utterly vivid, is not the fruit of an arcane philosophy but rather of sustained, almost childlike attention to the world. Nor is any of the single-minded cruelty or callousness of Picasso to be found in Carol herself. Her vision enjoys that capacious humanity which Pope John Paul II called typical of the feminine genius, which allows those who possess it—whether women or men—to see the other in light of his (or its) inherent created dignity. And so, when I asked her about her work as a mother as well as an artist, and mentioned Wallace Stevens’ remark that his work as a parent was a “terrible blow to literature,” she merely replied, “That’s terrible.” Her thinking on economy, then, can best be understood as a rejection of the either/or mentality characteristic of modernity.

The balance in all this is to be found in Carol’s faith, which is unassuming, simple, unabashed. The rosary at her bedside, the one which figures in many of her paintings, is the one she received at her confirmation. The Blessed Virgin appears frequently in her work, as in the monumental canvases on display at Holy Cross University, where Carol was professor of art for many years. And other canonical forms break upon the viewer throughout her body of work, as in the frames of French doors which suddenly show themselves to be crosses or in a series of canvases  chronicling the artist’s battle with breast cancer, where the language of the Pieta is deployed in poignant testimony to the beauty of marriage.

The Catholic faith is part of Carol’s long relationship to New Orleans, the city where she was born and where she has spent her life. It was on childhood picnics to City Park and visits to the New Orleans Museum of Art that Carol became conversant with the beauty of nature and of the human spirit. It was as one of John Kennedy Toole’s students that she honed some of that wit which sparkles in her conversation and her compositions. It is here that Carol has raised her family and given herself to generations of artists in the conviction that the approach to beauty is one of the avenues to God.

But it is time to leave the party now. Look back, for a moment, at the image of a tray of crystal glasses, containing in their facets all the light you had not taken time to see. See the empty skiff poised on the lurid verge of dusk, promising, almost threatening, to bear you on to the place where you must one day go. Meet those eyes, the ones tilted up into yours and the ones in the face of the young woman in the painting, seated in her wicker chair, giving yourself back to you, reminding you that there’s no place like home.

Carol Scott is professor emerita at the University of Holy Cross. Her work can be found at Gallery 600 Julia and the New Orleans Permanent Art Collection.