Carole Wade

Carole Wade is a Utah painter whose work centers on sense of place and the figure — the local imagery she has returned to across decades of practice, now rendered through a more pared-down language than the one she started with.

The shift took shape during the pandemic. After eighteen years working in a style she had grown comfortable with, she let curiosity take the lead. Color theory was the entry point: clear light and dark values, harmony, the possibilities of a limited palette. Making expressive marks and simpler shapes led her into a stretch of purely abstract work, which she has described as a personal freedom she did not know she needed. The subjects from her earlier paintings — the places, the bodies — eventually called her back. The current work is the answer to what she set out to learn: how much of the new abstract language can carry into the older subject matter without flattening it. She points to the trees as the clearest example. The shapes of trees, she says, are abstract paintings in themselves; simplifying is a win for both the viewer and the painter.

Her work is also represented at 15th Street Gallery in Salt Lake City, which has shown her alongside other Utah painters in group exhibitions reviewed in 15 Bytes, the state’s art magazine. Auction and gallery records appear on Artsy and MutualArt; her own studio site is carolewade.com.

She works in oil and acrylic on canvas; selected works are available as giclee prints. Subjects move between Western landscape, equestrian, and figure — never tightly, always with room for the painting to do its own thinking.