Laguna Art Museum exhibit centers on ‘Wuthering Heights’ character Heathcliff
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There’s vibrant color, engaging imagery and a strong sense of subversiveness. And at the center of Carole Caroompas’ posthumous exhibit at Laguna Art Museum is Heathcliff.
But this is no “Wuthering Heights.”
“The show has this Heathcliff series and there’s 10 works in the series and all 10 of them are included in the show,” said Rochelle Steiner, guest curator at Laguna Art Museum who curated “Carole Caroompas: Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour,” which runs through July 13.
“It’s the first time that the series has been shown completely, which is very exciting,” Steiner said. “She made them between 1997 and 2001. This work was inspired [in part] by her interest in ‘Wuthering Heights,’ that’s the Heathcliff reference.”
Caroompas, who spent her early life in Newport Beach and attended Cal State Fullerton before moving to Los Angeles, died at age 76 in 2022. With the help of her estate, the museum is showing the exhibit fully, with all 10 pieces. She was an artist inspired by pop culture and literature, feminism, gender and relationships.
“She got her MFA at USC and then after she graduated, she kind of found her way into the artist community of L.A.,” Steiner said. “She was a painter. Her paintings are quite interesting in terms of the way she mixes materials and sources and references. One of the things that she was very inspired by was music. So in this particular series, you see a lot of references to musicians. But she also was very interested in what she called ‘found embroidery,’ which is basically like everything from napkins to tablecloths to things that had embroidered edges. And those were incorporated into her paintings as well.”
Steiner said there’s a mix of painted, collaged and assembled works in Caroompas’ art.
“Rough and also very refined,” she said of the artist’s works. “Extremely colorful and extremely painted … mashed together. It’s quite an interesting aesthetic. Some of the imagery is taken from album covers or inspired by album covers or movies or TV shows or even postcards that she found. She was quite a kind of visual collector and then that got assembled into her artworks.”
“Queen of the Countryside” in the Heathcliff series is just one example. It uses acrylic paint and found embroidery on canvas over panel that’s nearly 8-feet tall, and has two sections. In one section, Heathcliff is different male rock stars — John Doe of LA punk band X and Joe Strummer of the Clash. They are with Exene Cervenka of X and Catherine Earnshaw, the fictional female lead character of “Wuthering Heights.”
“She was really … on the one hand, very grounded in art and idea and literature and the classics and the movies and the films,” Steiner said. “And on the other hand, she was incredibly fantastical in terms of her imagination and amalgamation of imagery.”
The works in the series range widely in size — from a couple of feet up to 8 feet.
“There’s really a sense of scale,” Steiner said.
Steiner also included some of the artist’s source material.
“For example, we found a few of the original postcards that she used, like images of kids or singers or others,” Steiner said. “I put those in the between so we can see what she was drawing from.”
Steiner also included Caroompas’ own copy of “Wuthering Heights” as part of the exhibit. The classic novel was written by English author Emily Bronte and published in 1847.
“So she wasn’t just kind of superficially interested in ‘Wuthering Heights,’” Steiner said. “She read it and read it many times and I reproduced a page from it. She marked on almost every page, like different passages, and she took notes, and she, you know, really studied it.”
At the heart of the Heathcliff series is relationships.
“She definitely was a feminist,” Steiner said. “On the one hand very much focused on relationships between men and women, and that comes out in many of the works [in Heathcliff]. … What is the relationship or structure of a relationship between men and women? But she was very interested in kind of deconstructing power dynamics and thinking about equality and inequality.”
Los Angeles artist Tom Knechtel said he first met Caroompas when she was invited to CalArts as a visiting artist in 1975, when he was in his second year of graduate school there.
“Carole’s inspirations were diverse: literature, film, rock music, the history of art, popular culture and advertising,” Knechtel said. “Before each body of work, she did extensive research — she often came to my house to raid my library. … The materials that she brought back from these investigations were not presented in a simple, straightforward fashion but were woven into a complex tapestry of conflicting images that create a conversation in front of the viewer.”
Artist Cliff Benjamin, who lives in Hawaii, is in charge of Caroompas’ estate.
“I knew Carole since 1985, until the day she died,” he said. “She and I were really good friends for many decades.”
He said she was a professor at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles for more than 30 years.
“It was a huge influence on … hundreds and hundreds of art students,” he said.
Benjamin said she was part of the generation that lived through civil rights, women’s and anti-war movements.
“She was part of that ’60s generation that went through all of those different movements and was very much about doing the right thing,” he said.
The Laguna Art Museum is located at 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. For more information and to order tickets, visit lagunaartmuseum.org.
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