Carol Rhodes

Carol Mary Rhodes (7 April 1959 – 4 December 2018) was a Scottish artist known for paintings and drawings of landscapes and marked by human intervention. Rhodes was born in Edinburgh, but spent her infancy and youth in Serampore, India. She moved to the UK in her mid teens and studied fine art at the Glasgow School of Art. Graduating in 1982 she became politically active around issues of disarmament, feminism and social justice. Her focus returned to painting around 1990, and she developed her distinctive idiom of aerial-view, ‘man-made’ landscapes around 1994. These began to be exhibited in the United Kingdom and internationally, and entered many public collections. Rhodes’s work, and her part-time lecturing at Glasgow School of Art, was influential for younger generations of artists. In 2013, she was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

Biography Carol Mary Rhodes was born on 7 April 1959 in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh. She was the daughter of the medical doctor and theologian William Rhodes, and his wife Helen (née MacDonald), a former detective. Rhodes had an elder sister and a younger adopted brother. Her parents were also missionaries for the Church of Scotland and were posted to India. Rhodes lived her initial years in Nagpur, In 1971, the family sent her to be educated at the Woodstock School, Rhodes took part in the Reclaim the Night demonstrations, In 1994, her work was on exhibition in the New Art Scotland show at the Centre for Contemporary Arts and the Aberdeen Art Gallery. She began working with the Andrew Mummery Gallery in 1997 and her paintings were collected by the Tate, Arts Council England, the British Council and the Yale Center for British Art among other institutions. and in 1999 Rhodes was nominated for the Jerwood Painting Prize. using oils, "in a very, very concentrated way",

Rhodes’s work has been discussed my many critics. The New York Times ' Ken Johnson observed that in her works "roads cut straight or wind across the rectangle, dividing broad areas textured to resemble agricultural fields, forests, sand or bodies of water." In the Architects' Journal Rory Olcayto noted the colours used are "pale, as if drenched by the sun or washed through by rain." Patrick Elliott for The Scotsman called each painting "a carefully judged marriage of precision and ambiguity. They are not political statements, or at least not overtly so, and she spoke of them in terms of colour, brushwork and composition."