ROUND TRIP
2026 Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas paper: 16”x20”
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Forty minutes in a hot metal bullet led me to question my existence (yet again).
Earlier this year I was sealed in a plane on a hot tarmac for forty minutes, with no AC and no air moving. As a mentor later helped me see, there was a part of me that was wondering if this was the end.
They finally deboarded everyone. As we all waited to hear our fates, an announcement came over the intercom: the cabin had reached 140 degrees F, and they’d need to locate a different plane to take us to our “final destination.” Two hours later, the same passengers, flight attendants and pilots found our way onto a different plane and went for round two.
I shared that flight with two darling young girls. They watched Project Hail Mary while I watched Flow, Gints Zilbalodis’s wordless film about a cat and a flood.
What is existence? Have I accomplished what I came here to do?
The first marks for these pieces started in a Moleskine journal and a passage from Be Here Now by Ram Dass on the planes of existence (mind creating matter, the idea behind the universe, YOU ARE IT). And then came a series of studies on newsprint in charcoal: plane + people.
About two months after the flight, I was at an antique shop in the Poconos and left with a copy of The Radiant Universe: Electronic Images from Space by Michael Marten and John Chesterman, shown below. It calls our atmosphere “a lucky fluke” and says the whole system “balances on a knife edge.” The flight feels like I lived inside that sentence.
In typical Caroline fashion, most of the recognizable symbols and elements in these paintings were not “planned”. The only one I really went in with a “plan” for is the first one.
Titled, in order of appearance from left to right:
1. ROUND TRIP
2. FLY
3. JEWEL HEART
4. CAST INTO OUTER DARKNESS
Also included below: above mentioned charcoal studies, shots from the process, cloud textures I studied and the two pages I referenced the most from The Radiant Universe.
