The late artist Carole Caroompas was once asked why rock and roll provided such generative source material for her paintings and performance art. Caroompas had frequented shows since her teenage years and played music when she wasn’t making art, yet her fascinations didn’t necessarily lie in the minutiae of chord progressions. Caroompas was beguiled by the way the genre both reaffirmed and eschewed the gendered tensions of heterosexual relationships. So rock and roll’s inevitable eroticism enthralled her too. “Key within all of this is desire,” she explained of the music. “The person onstage is a vessel of desire.”
A posthumous show currently on view at Southern California’s Laguna Art Museum features a series of raucous paintings that Caroompas created nearly three decades ago that meld rock and roll with another significant constant in her work: recognizable characters from classic literature. Guest curated by Rochelle Steiner, Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Goes on Tour is visible in the museum’s California Gallery. The exhibition sees Caroompas taking on Wuthering Heights’s sulking protagonist Heathcliff, casting the Byronic hero as a 1960s-era guitar god lavished with flowers and adulation on the road. The “femme fatale” character noted in the show’s title is Caroompas herself, who appears via several proxies within the series’ nine paintings and changes forms depending on who has the upper hand in the relationship at that particular moment. In one painting, she assumes the role of a commanding and motorcycle-revving dominatrix; in another, she’s a subservient housewife.
Nearly all of the works within the Heathcliff series place a man and a woman in confrontational positions. A glass vitrine in the middle of the gallery even includes a torn-out page from Caroompas’s own copy of Wuthering Heights, in which she’d underlined several passages highlighting Catherine’s yearning for Heathcliff. In Caroompas’s irreverent hands, a novel’s well-trod beats become fodder for a subversive riff on the onstage (and on page) mythologies that can often take root within, transforming how someone moves within a world hell-bent on maintaining its traditional binaries.
Installation view of Carole Caroompas: Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour, March 30 – July 13, 2025. Courtesy of the Laguna Art Museum.
A punk-rock polyglot who passed away in 2022 from Alzheimer’s disease, Caroompas left behind a vast body of work that pulled generously from collaged materials, anatomical sketches, Pop Art iconography, film-noir strips, portraiture, and other snippets of ephemera from high and low culture alike. Though she did incorporate textiles and found objects, she often transformed her source material by painting it herself; the resulting works have the look of collages but with imagery mostly rendered by hand. Some of her local contemporaries (such as Alexis Smith) also employed collage as a subversive medium, but, despite emerging out of a distinct Los Angeles milieu, Caroompas found her own edge. After joining a cohort of artists associated with the feminist art movement of the 1970s—she served on the board of the LA feminist cooperative gallery Womanspace—Caroompas started making abstract drip paintings before finally settling on a narrative approach. The flawed heroines and brooding antiheroes of novels and fairy tales often sparked something within her, and they became her subject matter. In the early to mid-1990s, she considered Frankenstein in Before and After Frankenstein: The Woman Who Knew Too Much (1992), and imagined how Hester Prynne’s life might intersect with Zorro’s in Hester and Zorro: In Quest of a New World (1996). The Heathcliff series began in 1997 and stretched into 2001, right as one century was cresting into another.
A wave of familiar cultural nostalgia accompanied the transition into the 2000s, and Caroompas’s paintings captured this presciently. The 1990s were punctuated by a cultural reassessment of the 1960s’ revolutionary idealism and louche sartorial preferences, sometimes to violent ends (see: the disastrous Woodstock ’99 festival, which exposed the curdled core of the peace and love decade.) Fittingly, the paintings in Caroompas’s Heathcliff series tug on the decade’s iconography, nodding to them as dated products of their time and reconsidering them from the vantage of the nostalgia-drenched ’90s. Florals crop up all over these paintings, stubborn as weeds, and inevitably evoke the image of the flower child. Perhaps uncoincidentally, Janis Joplin also gets a nod within one collage titled Wild Is the Wild (1998).
For the Heathcliff series, Caroompas also rummaged through her trove of found materials, generously imbuing these paintings with the embroidery and bandannas that one might have worn at a Golden Gate Park love-in decades ago. These flowy materials don’t just give paintings like Queen of the Countryside (1997) a multidimensional textural heft, though. By situating these slivers of embroidery alongside collaged cutouts of punk-rock icons Excene Cervenka and John Doe (of the Los Angeles punk band X), pin-up images of ’40s beauty queens, and an image of Wuthering Heights’s own Catherine Earnshaw, Caroompas calls attention to these emblems of domesticity typically derided as “women’s work.” In her art, Caroompas makes a point to elevate this traditional trapping of domesticity, demanding instead that it be seen as a critical addition to the pantheon of fine art.
Carole Caroompas, Heathcliff and the Femme Fatale Go on Tour: Wild is the Wind, 1998. Courtesy of Cliff Benjamin and the Carole Caroompas Estate, and courtesy of Laguna Art Museum. Photo: Eric Stoner.
In practically all of her paintings, Caroompas divorces these pieces of embroidery from their fully realized forms—say, full-size curtains and tablecloths—to spectacular effect. The one notable exception is The Honeysuckle Embraces the Thorn (1999). Unlike the other works in the series, which feature modest slices of found-textile works, an ornate canary and burnt orange–tinged embroidery is a sprawling focal point. The center of the painting teems with a black-and-white collage of rock musicians, veins popping out of their necks in a moment of agonizing performance. Yet the embroidery practically subsumes this image. By adjusting the focus, Caroompas urges the viewer to reconsider how textiles have been historically dismissed as the purview of homemakers. The art form requires a nimble set of skills for anyone to pull off and is as worthy of respect as a painting might be.
The exploitative nature of labor as performed by women factors elsewhere in the show. Blue Impressions Are Left on Her Colorless Skin (2001) draws its name from a line in Wuthering Heights, an observation about how easily a sense of care can curdle into real hurt. It is one of the largest paintings in the series, and perhaps its most telling. Caroompas incorporates large images of women, originally featured in escort advertisements in the back pages of LA Weekly, with prints from Oaxacan kitchen towels—including flora and words such as “Tuyo es Corazón,” or “My heart is yours.” Heathcliff is played here by the Australian musician Nick Cave, whose downward-facing head is encircled by hundreds of minuscule blue stars twinkling around the palm cards of working women. By having these escort advertisements revolve around Cave’s face, his expression wrought with a sense of defeat, Caroompas ruminates on the undercurrent of exploitation that belies these suggestive images. The work’s title refers to a moment in Wuthering Heights when Heathcliffe grips Catherine’s arm with more force than he intended, leaving marks; the sorrow of Cave-as-Heathcliffe reflects his inability to break a cycle in which he is a reluctant participant.
Heathcliff, the conceptual backbone of the series and a shape-shifting figure throughout, appears as a psychedelic prince in A Cuckoo’s History (1998–99), one of the show’s standouts. He stares down the viewer, hands in his waistcoat pockets, all swaggering gait. Surrounding him is a purple haze of nude women, a nod to Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 song. Here, Heathcliff’s head appears to be adorned with two upside-down birds’ nests, a wreath of sorts. It would suggest abundant fertility were it not for nearby film negatives showing a woman holding a gun mid-fire, the bullet soon poised to puncture a man on the other side of the frame—a shocking image that complicates the binaries that Caroompas calls our attention to.
Besides flowers, guns are the most prominent visual motifs throughout the series of paintings. In Mister, You’ve Been Framed (1998), Caroompas playfully uses hot-pink pieces of tape, which might have scrappily held together a do-it-yourself punk-rock zine, as the image’s literal framework. Meanwhile, a disquieting scene unfolds: a woman points a gun at a man, the sucker who’s just been framed. It could be a typical pastoral embroidered scene were it not for the raging mosh pit appearing below the figures. Caroompas’s Heathcliffs and femme fatales are always caught in the fraught seconds before hesitations become actions, as if the clock were about to strike before high noon. In her painting The Honeysuckle Embraces the Thorn, a man and a woman, lusciously enclosed by all that embroidery, look askance at each other in a fun-house mirror, as though waiting for the other to blink first before making a move. When that move finally happens, maybe it will change everything, exploding the ingrained binaries we all intuitively understand.
