About Caroline Nelson

Caroline Nelson (born 1998) grew up in Arlington, Virginia. From a very young age, she had a passion for drawing and painting and was encouraged by her parents to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. In 2016, she attended Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, Virginia and was deeply disheartened by the state of education in contemporary art schools and the lack of any technical instruction. Two years later, she withdrew from college to pursue a traditional, classical education in realism. 

Caroline trained privately with artist Henry Wingate in his Madison, Virginia studio full time for a year and a half learning the "Boston School Tradition" of impressionist realism. Under his tutelage she embraced the principle of making art revolving around “the Good, the True and the Beautiful”. She immersed herself in honing her eyes to “see” as she drew and painted entirely from life. In the beginning of 2020, Caroline received a scholarship to attend a month-long drawing workshop at Grand Central Atelier in New York City where she studied the French Academic method of conceptualizing and rendering subjects three-dimensionally on a two-dimensional surface. She further pursued her training in this process and worked online with artist Joshua LaRock before continuing her education at East Oaks Studio in Raleigh, North Carolina as a resident artist from 2020-2022.

Caroline now works and maintains her own studio in North Carolina and is highly inspired by the works of 19th-century masters such as William Bouguereau, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Solomon J. Solomon and Frederick Leighton. She wishes to celebrate truth and natural beauty in her oil paintings with compositions centering around themes of tranquility, youth, femininity and hope. Caroline is passionate to continue to learn and hopes to deepen her understanding of the timeless classical principles of concept, design, and beautiful rendering as she creates her paintings.

She currently sells her work through Arcadia Contemporary in New York City.