Artist Bio
Caroline C. Blaker began life in Connecticut, an area colonized by and connected to her forebears, but without any connection to their stories. In her childhood home, she was surrounded by the works of a long familial lineage of women artists, and Blaker found solace in painting and drawing images conjured from her imagination. In 1988 one of these artists, Catherine Chapman, became her first teacher in oil painting.
Blaker nurtured her creative pursuits at Hopkins School, earning top marks in the visual arts. She then attained her BFA in Ceramics from Washington University in St. Louis, earning Dean's List honors and working as an advertising designer at the university's award-winning newspaper, Student Life. Between her junior and senior years of college (2001-2002), Blaker spent an academic year in Paris, France via Wells College, where she studied with acclaimed photographer Philip Vermes, copied Reubens' The Exchange of the Two Princesses from France and Spain live in the Louvre, and avidly researched Gothic Architecture and other traces of pre-Renaissance life in the region.
Upon graduation, Blaker discovered her now-emblematic Latex paint colors when decorating her St. Louis loft. At this time, Blaker took a course in web development, a then under-established but impossibly interesting industry, knowing that she would need a website if she was to reach the broadest possible audience with her work. The web achieved a depth of information and ease of access that inspired Blaker's most lengthy professional research project to date, Twitterscapes, and prompted her to become an independent web programmer and principal of her own small business.
Throughout this journey, Blaker observed her creative efforts leaning heavily to web development. She began to miss her studio, a longing that inspired her to paint pixels on canvas. As her hybrid infomatic-aesthetic grew, her work began encompassing spirals, a metaphor for the ever-ongoing, and evolved into Twitterscapes a completely web-driven, data-centric image art form, producing unique images on demand and representing the first effort of its kind.
In 2024, Blaker was awarded a competitive Rail Trail Artist Residency through the city of Albuquerque, where she lives. She is once again back to making physical objects as part of a weekly practice, which involve electricity and light, as well as web connectivity.
Blaker is actively working on municipal design projects and an Albuquerque Rail Trail sculpture. She also leads Aquarian Web Studio, the only web design and hardware studio in the state.