ABOUT CAROLYN SHARON GOODRIDGE
By Union of Excellence, Sept 19, 2020
NAME:
Carolyn Sharon Goodridge
ROLE:
Artist/ Painter
FURTHER ROLE:
Founder and Executive Director of Art Impact International, Inc.
INDUSTRY:
Art Industry
ACCREDITATION:
Accredited under the UNOFEX Standards of Excellence since 2020
ABOUT THE THE STORY OF CAROLYN SHARON GOODRIDGE, AN ABSTRACT PAINTER AND FOUNDER OF THE ART IMPACT INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION
Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies October 21, 1960, Carolyn Sharon Goodridge immigrated to the U.S. in 1963. Carolyn was introduced to a heavily spiritual way of life by her grandmother, Beryl Odell, pastor of a Pentecostal church in Brooklyn, New York. She was also developing skills in the fine arts by age 10. Carolyn started writing short stories, plays, and poems; eventually, she discovered the piano and guitar, and finally, she found her passion for drawing and painting during mid ‘70s.
After the death of her grandmother in 1976, Carolyn's spiritual direction shifted away from Western theologies and landed in the Korean Zen Buddhist tradition. During this time, she left home to live in a Chogye International Zen Center in Chelsea Manhattan to study Zen meditation. There she studied with the late Zen Master Seung Sahn, founder of the Kwan Um School of Zen. She developed skills in Yoga under the guidance of her teacher Ma Prem at the Carnegie Hall Yoga Studio and became widely read in India's Eastern religious philosophies.
© Carolyn Sharon Goodridge
In 1986 Carolyn began her formal art education at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York as a night student in textile design. It's here at FIT, where she found her unlimited love of painting and natural understanding of color theory. In the winter of 1984, Carolyn took a four-month journey through Germany, Sri Lanka, and India to restore her faith in life after a painful divorce. The trip was a wonderful boost to her self-confidence.
Goodridge left New York in 1990 with her two-year-old twin daughters to pursue full-time matriculation at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Carolyn spent the next seven years living and working as an on-campus art student and university art gallery assistant, extensively exhibiting her work on campus and neighboring towns.
In 1993, Carolyn was granted her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Florida, and a Master in Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1997. An avid student of art history, Goodridge was inspired by the mystical works of color field artists Mark Tobey, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, the fantastic master colorist Hans Hofmann, the musically oriented, German Expressionist Vassily Kandinsky, the exploratory work on dreams and the collective unconscious by Paul Kleé, and genius of musicians John Cage and Ravi Shankar.
© Carolyn Sharon Goodridge
Goodridge is an abstract painter inspired by music and color. She paints with encaustics (pigmented beeswax) and brings a rich integration of spiritual philosophy with modern science and ancient psychology. The paintings' titles are constructed from personal interpretations of dreams, classic texts such as the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, and essays on quantum theory. The imagery is intended to stimulate the intuitive and emotional sensitivities and point the viewer to a higher consciousness of light and love and the power of healing by the spirit.
Goodridge has exhibited in distinguished spaces such as the U.S. Embassy in Rome, Italy, and the New York Guggenheim Museum. She is an independent curator, Founder and Executive Director of Art Impact® International, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to edifying, empowering, and nurturing artists to continue to enrich and inspire humanity. The artist is dedicated to the preservation of creativity, past, present, and future.
© Carolyn Sharon Goodridge
