Caro, a young aspiring oil painter who’s currently studying Fine Arts at Chelsea Art College, interestingly wanted to be a Physicist only a short while ago. Although she dreamed of becoming an artist growing up, forever sketching and painting as a child and as a teenager, Caro, like most of us during our adolescence, decided to shelve her passion when life suddenly appeared to become that much more serious. For her, this pivotal moment came when she had to choose what A-Levels to study (for our international readers, these are qualifications that students in the UK need to complete if they wish to attend university), as it was at this point that Caro concluded that if she was going to secure a steady job then she would need a traditional degree. Luckily for her, as you’ll uncover, Caro already possessed a deep fascination with science, particularly ideas revolving around space and time, and so the subject Caro decided upon was Physics – well, until she was handed a gigantic schoolbook on the subject.
‘I started crying over this textbook and I called my mum and I was like “look I just can’t do this, I just have to go back to art”... I couldn’t just leave it because I just physically couldn’t go a day without wanting to make something’ Caro tells me, the panic and enthusiasm from those times echoing through her voice. Though Caro wasn’t just expressing this out of the blue as if we were in some sort of therapy session. In fact, what she was telling me here was part of a response to a question that I ask nearly all the artists that I talk to: ‘Why art? What made you want to create in the first place?’ I frequently and curiously enquire.
Normally the responses provided by artists centre upon a desire to express themselves in some way or another, yet Caro’s initial reply here is one I haven’t heard before and one which brings into question the very nature of how we perceive and treat our passions in life: ‘What made me want to create was, yes, a desire to express myself, but also because I didn’t feel like I had a choice’ she says. We’re often told to ‘chase our passions’, yet we seem to forget that those interests and desires are the ones pursuing us. After all, if we cease doing what we enjoy, be it art, football, writing or otherwise, then it’s often not because we’ve failed to follow those dreams but since we’ve repressed them.
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