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Lisa Loy
Her name is everywhere––above the mantle at Duck Woods Country Club, on the wall of the Dare County Justice Center, and in countless private homes on the Outer Banks and across the nation. She is a watercolor artist, and her name is Carol Trotman.
To those familiar with her artistry, realistic, still life representations of flowers generally come to mind. From across a room, many Outer Bankers easily recognize her work and put her name to the painting, but most of us couldn’t put a face with the flower. We decided to plan a visit to meet Carol Trotman and her husband Maurice, a retired Landmark Communications executive, at their Kitty Hawk home.
Our photo tour of the Trotman home, tucked away in the shady, rolling ridges of Linkside just west of Sea Scape Golf Course, coincided with the blooming of the season’s first violets, and she was reminded of the May Baskets of her childhood in Persia, Iowa.
“We always put violets among the fudge, popcorn balls and sticks of gum,” she said. “Then we would place them on our friends' doorsteps, knock on the door and run away.”
As she led the way into her foyer and beyond into the living room, I felt enveloped by the air of balance and serenity one might savor in the cool of a garden or on a warm beach. Windows and walls of paintings, a piano, a fireplace, worn and weary books, the familiar aroma of breakfast wafting from the kitchen, all coaxed my senses into a state of peace.
I didn’t expect to feel that way. I know Carol as a woman of incredible pep and constant activity. I half expected her to say, “Onward Ho!” She didn’t. She smiled, and with a graceful, welcoming sweep of her hand, we began to stroll through the Trotman’s beautiful home.
Paintings, so profuse in number suspended along the walls of the hallway, beckon with vivid color, and I paused to admire the work of other artists including Chris Haltigan and Shirley Ruff. In the master bedroom, her dramatic, sprawling floral composition with a black background, extends into three frames above the matching bedspreads. She commented on the fun she has planning the decoré in her rooms as an extension of the artwork. And indeed, I was able to enjoy the dimensional effect of her effort.
The kitchen is positioned as “command central” so that Carol and Maurice can enjoy interaction with family and friends while they are serving up food and fun. The dining room is more formal, and though average in size, is made to feel quite spacious by the mass of windows on one side and the immense white space she allotted to coax the full power of her firey color in her recent painting entitled, “Birds of Paradise.”
The parade of art, like Carol, is in constant motion as her paintings are sold and replaced with new efforts. It was a genuine pleasure to enjoy the full scope of her subject matter––the human form, animals, boats, and marine life. She is known for her great skill with color, gently exaggerating the blush in a petal or the backlight through a vase. But perusing these subjects in motion, I gained a greater understanding of her keen sense of line and proportion.
Similar to the study she gives to the composition of a painting, she and Maurice chose the site for their home carefully. Ideally, it had to be a large lot on a hill, it had to be in a quiet, wooded neighborhood away from the beach. They found it in the Linkside community just west of Sea Scape Golf Course.
Their two-story home on a brick foundation is roomy, and comfortable with more light streaming in the windows than one would think possible in such a wooded neighborhood. The design, conceived by Carol and put to pen by Frye Design in Nags Head, came to bear almost 10 years ago, after the Trotmans decided to retire here from the Churchland area of Suffolk, Virginia. They already owned a cottage here, but their needs would change as year ‘round residents––there would be visits to come by their two sons and their growing families and Carol would need a large studio in which to work.
Although she did retire from her life as a high school art teacher, and for health reasons, her life as a sculptor, she still needed a creative outlet. She chose watercolor, and the teacher became the student. In retirement, she found she had the time to solve problems in composition and ask herself what it was she was trying to say in a painting. She has evolved as an artist, and her career in watercolor is in high gear. She is a signature member of the Watercolor Society of North Carolina.
But as a retiree, she hasn’t been so successful; she’s busier than ever. In addition to her consuming work as an artist, she often gives herself to her church family and her community. She loves life on the Outer Banks, she knows how to smell the violets.
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