For six decades, Carol L. Sirot made work in private, not from obscurity, but from intention. Paintings, collages, drawings, and sculptures: a universe entire, kept close, shared with few.
She grew up in Port Chester, New York. Her mother, who lived with severe rheumatic heart disease and was often bedridden, was her first and most enduring teacher, not in art but in character. A woman who gave to everyone around her without hesitation. Carol has never stopped learning from that example.
Carol studied art at Smith College, where she found that painting was not simply a skill but a way of knowing: a language more precise, in certain moments, than any other. Graduate studies at Oberlin deepened this, and a lifelong curiosity about philosophy ran alongside her studio practice ever after.
She married Gustave Sirot, a Yale University faculty member, and made New Haven her home. For decades she painted quietly, accumulating a body of work that few people saw. That was not a failure of ambition. It was the work itself.
"She gave to everyone, one way or another, and was my inspiration."
What sets Carol's work apart is not any single medium or style. She moved freely between geometric abstraction and gestural painting, between torn-paper collage and oil on canvas, between pressed-leaf compositions and bold expressive drawing. Each piece is fully considered. Nothing is casual.
Her palettes carry the same quality as the work itself: bold but never cold. Burnt oranges, deep ochres, terracottas, sage greens. Colors that have aged well because they were right to begin with.
She sees herself as a "speck of dust," and in that humility lies the secret to her scale. Now, for the first time, her work steps forward.