Dear Readers, I wish I could say that I could take credit for the following article, but I can’t. The following article comes from the wonderful Nina Shengold, as a tribute to the late Carol Zaloom. To be fair, I did ask her for her permission to share this with you all since her tribute is a lot better, more articulate that I could be, try as I might.
So, please enjoy this latest tribute to a fabulous friend and, as always….
Shine On!!!
Some people move through this world with a shimmer of magic. Like a flame-haired Johnny Appleseed, artist Carol Zaloom sowed beauty wherever she went.
Carol had a wicked sense of humor and a lusty, irresistible laugh. She drew people to her like a magnet. She loved freely and deeply, finding joy amid barred owls and crows, cats and cave paintings, a basket of freshly picked mushrooms, a gorgeous kimono or a child’s drawing. Her fiercest, mama-bear love went to her children and grandchildren, her old friends and lovers, and the man she always called My Poet, Mikhail Horowitz.
When she died on October 16, 2022 after a long illness, loved ones hailed her in mythological terms: Mother Gaia, wild woman, sorceress, ultimate Earth Mother, mentor, sage, goddess, dynamic soul, bright and joyful flame: magic incarnate.
Carol Jane Smith was born in Decatur, Georgia on August 6, 1947. The first time she was placed on a pony, she gave it a kick and it took off at a gallop. An unbridled redhead and self-proclaimed tomboy, she adored horses, art and popguns, especially “Annie Oakley’s Golden Smoke Rifle,” which she begged her parents to buy. They declined, but decades later her son Django gave her one as a Christmas gift. It hangs over the door of her Saugerties studio.
After graduating from St. Pius X Catholic High School, Carol attended Marymount College in Washington, DC, where she met Chris Zaloom, a Georgetown student and aspiring musician.
“She was the prettiest girl in DC,” Chris recalls. “All my friends said, ‘She’s the one.’” They got married at 19.
Carol found a job at DC’s first head shop, while Chris rehearsed with The Brave Maggots. They spent their wedding gifts on a three-month “Europe on $5 a Day” honeymoon, roaming from the museums of London and Paris to the bazaars of Istanbul. Carol drank everything in.
They moved to New York’s Little Italy in 1967, enjoying the low-rent Bohemian life. Carol and fellow artist Sandi Zinaman, another pre-Raphaelite beauty, modeled for fantasy-and-comics artists Jeff Jones, Michael Kaluta and Dan Green, posing as brides of Dracula or in boar-tooth necklaces and vintage furs.
When Chris’s new band Fear Itself brought them to Woodstock, he and Carol lived in a schoolbus before finding a derelict house tucked into the woods north of Saugerties. Built by an Irish quarryman in 1852, the rambling stone house had no electricity or indoor plumbing, but plenty of black snakes and broken glass.
“I knew it was mine the first time I saw it,” Carol proclaimed with her native exuberance. She spent the next 50 years making it magical.
Carol holding young Django.
When sons Django and Kahlil were born, she bathed them by the glow of oil lamps in water she’d pumped from the well. Little by little, the house acquired modern conveniences and a distinct personality.
The builders had plastered a curving stone wall at the base of the stairs. Carol graced it with an original cave painting of a horse. She silkscreened door panels, hung antique lace dresses in windows, strewn antlers, sleighbells and photographs over the mantel.
The couple split up but remained on good terms. When the boys were teens, Carol joined friends to see poet Mikhail Horowitz perform with jazz musician Joe Giardullo. Already a fan of Mik’s movie reviews for the Daily Freeman, Carol invited him to her annual Easter party. He arrived an hour early — he claims by mistake — and helped her set up.
Carol worked as a photographer and darkroom technician at Woodstock Times, and when Mik was hired as the newspaper’s Cultural Czar they began hanging out together. “We’d take two-hour dinner breaks on deadline nights,” he reports with a grin.
When Mik got pneumonia, Carol took him home and nursed him back to health. Then he borrowed a friend’s car and totaled it. Again, Carol took him in.
“One day she looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t you just move in?’” They shared the house with a rotating bevy of cats since 1989, turning it into an idiosyncratically beautiful shrine to the creative life.
Nobody seems to remember exactly when Carol first picked up a linoleum gouge. “She was always drawing,” says Chris. “But once she found linocuts, that was her thing.”
Cutting linoleum plates is an intuitive process. The artist must carve in reverse — right to left, dark to light. Every cut creates textures that stipple white space. Each application of ink with a brayer yields subtly different results.
Pulling prints in a tiny studio packed with an astonishing density of art supplies, vintage graphics, and cherished objects, Carol hung them to dry in the windows with old wooden clothespins. She often enhanced duotone originals with hand-applied watercolor, so each print was truly unique.
Largely self-taught, she refined her printmaking skills at the Woodstock School of Art, where she lectured on French cave paintings in 1998, created a limited-edition fundraiser Annual Print in 2011, and started teaching in 2014.
Former WSA president Kate McGloughlin writes of Carol’s work, “She made carving a linocut and imbuing its character with spirit was like breathing for her. Each line told a story, every mark had a spark of the divine.”
The women in Carol Zaloom linocuts are never still. They stride, snowshoe, gallop and row; they leap over fences to outrun a bull — or ride one. A devotee of Paleolithic art, Japanese prints and Celtic fairytales, Carol wove many mythologies, mixing and matching at will: Daphne morphs into a laurel tree, a samurai centaur flips open his fan, an armored knight battles a dragon whose lair is a laptop computer, Edgar Allan Poe sports a raven cravat.
But she also brought mythic dimensions to local wildlife: a porcupine pierces the stars with his quills, a pileated woodpecker blesses the woods with a flash of red crest, snowy trees host a parliament of owls.
These images — graphically striking, aswirl with enchanting details — graced countless local posters, theatrical flyers and book jackets for authors such as Sigrid Heath, Janice King, Michael Perkins, Tad Richards, Gail Straub, and Janine Pommy Vega. Carol’s illustrations appeared in Yankee magazine, Sky & Telescope, Chronogram, Woodstock Times and its sister papers (now Hudson Valley One).
Her designs were rendered in granite and steel for New York City’s Carl Schurz Park, alongside Gracie Mansion. Her mythopoetic painted baseballs are in the private collections of Official Historian of Major League Baseball John Thorn and Harry Belafonte.
Everyone who worked with Carol cherished her wealth of creative ideas and generous cross-pollination, along with her fondness for gossip and world-warming laugh. Poet and essayist Will Nixon collaborated with her on ten books. “When I got to sit down with Carol at her big wooden table and see the prints she laid out before me, to marvel at what she’d created, that’s when publishing a book started to feel like fun,” Nixon said. “I always left feeling light on my feet.”
That magisterial table also served as the gathering place for the hundreds of prints Carol sold on the annual Saugerties Artists Studio Tour, which she joined in 2003. In recent years, Mik participated as well, selling leaf-print collages and gleefully altered baseball cards.
“She and Mikhail loved to welcome people to their home studios, putting out a welcoming spread of food and drink. It became a joke that visitors could have lunch at Carol’s,” says tour coordinator Barbara Bravo.
Artist Galen Green, who assisted Carol on multiple tours, recalls the reaction of first-time guests to the quarryman’s house. “They’d come through the door with their heads bent at the low threshold, and then look up and all around and say they felt like they’d walked into another world. Into Narnia or Tolkien’s Shire. Though an Irishman once came in and said, ‘Oh, I’ve been in this house before!’
“There were people who came every year. It was like a pilgrimage. When parents settled in for snacks and what promised to be long conversations, Carol would often lean over conspiratorially to the children and say, ‘So there’s a dollhouse on the third floor ….’ ”
No ordinary doll house. Carol built the two-story fairy house of wood laced with lichen and twinkle lights, oak leaves and butterfly wings. Like her home, it was a cabinet of wonders, a handmade place of enchantment. She brought a touch of alchemy to everything she made, including dinner.
Carol and Mik were legendary hosts. Good conversation, wine, and an endless parade of delectable dishes flowed freely around their long table. I took an informal survey of friends who enjoyed the fruits of Carol’s kitchen, served under a chandelier entwined with crystals and hawk feathers. Here are a few favorite dishes: sweet potato biscuits, apricot chicken, chanterelles, “sinful” scalloped potatoes, pasta puttanesca, shrimp gumbo with pickled okra and cornbread, almond and pear cake.
Actor and writer David Smilow did not miss a beat: “Whatever she made in the biggest pot.”
David recalls the pleasure Carol took in sharing her bounty with others. “She cooked very simply, but with so much heart. Her art was like that, too, rough and at the same time very intricate. She really enjoyed her own work, and the ability to please other people with it. She savored so much.”
Skip Arthur, a dear friend for 55 years, agrees. “Carol’s love, like her way with food and art, just flowed from her,” he said. “There was style, but no real recipe. It just emerged from her intimate understanding of the nature and balance of the things she touched and loved.”
On the night Carol died, the barred owls in my swamp were unusually vocal, fluting from treetops. Just before dawn, I woke from a dream of her floating past my window in a sky full of stars, serene and beautiful, long red hair flowing — a vision straight out of a Marc Chagall painting or a Carol Zaloom linocut. It felt so real that I rolled over to see if she was still there.
I’d like to think that she is, blessing the sky and our lives with her nonpareil shimmer of everyday magic.
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