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Watch Me Rot by Courtney Caroline is a deeply personal series exploring grief through food. After the loss of her partner, Courtney turned to painting to process the slow, quiet ache of mourning.

Amal Alhomsi

Interview

Grief & Pasta: The Art of Courtney Caroline


It began in an Italian trattoria. The scene had three elements. First, slants of light through linen-curtained windows. Second, a fresh pasta dish with a generous portion—heaped with steaming tagliatelle and a careless snowfall of Parmigiano. Third, an unassuming chef with a love for detail and an unchoreographed server with a passion for dish placement. The result: a simple yet beautiful meal that inspired an art career. “I looked at the table and thought, this is a meal worth painting.” After returning from Italy, Courtney Caroline quit her job in health care and pursued her dream of becoming a full-time artist.




Raised in the Okanagan, Courtney is a self-taught painter whose work transforms the everyday into small altars of attention. Her vibrant acrylics explore the textures of shared meals and solitary moments—dishes plated with memory, salt, ritual, and longing. Whether it’s a shelf of peanut butter or a dish of oysters, her subjects aren't chosen for extravagance, but for their emotional temperature. Food, for Courtney, is a language: “when you can’t speak the same language, you can still connect over a recipe,” she says.


Nowhere is this more evident than in her deeply personal series Watch Me Rot, painted in the months following the sudden loss of her partner. The collection is made up of four pieces—each piece dwelling in the liminal space where grief and nourishment intertwine, where rot becomes rebirth. The series embraces decay not as destruction, but as transformation. “Grief is patient,” Courtney told me. “If you don’t address it, it’ll wait for you.” In Watch Me Rot, Courtney rejects the modern obsession with “healing” as a linear path. Instead, she offers the messy, necessary work of sitting with what cannot be fixed. Poet Ocean Vuong writes that “Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof of your own ruin.” Yet ruin, to Courtney, is where flavor begins.


1. Take Me Home

In this painting, rows of jarred pickles sit neatly on grocery store shelves. “It’s about the need to feel safe, to find something familiar,” Courtney says. The pickles become more than preserved cucumbers—they’re a metaphor for how rest, stillness, and time coax flavour from something raw. Scholar Carolyn Korsmeyer, in Savoring Disgust, notes that preservation “defies decay by embracing it,” a tension Courtney mirrors in her brushstrokes.



2. Cured 

A storefront, a row of cured meats hanging delicately in the window. From a distance, the painting could be mistaken for a celebration of European street scenes, but the title tells another story. The title’s promise of “cure” is a ruse—grief, like cured meat, cannot be rushed. The meats are suspended, timeless, much like sorrow itself. They are not healing. They are holding. Theorist Sara Ahmed writes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, “Emotions are not just about movement; they are about attachments and the ways in which we are moved.” Cured reminds us that grief may not go away—but it can mature. It can find its own shelf, its own place to hang. 


3. Good Morning, Darling 

A tender domestic scene: plates with bacon, eggs, jam, and bagels. A bouquet of flowers cheers the table. It’s modest, yet intimate. “Mornings were the hardest,” Courtney confides. “Getting up to make breakfast became a ritual—a small gesture of going back to normal.” 


4. Say Cheese 

“It was odd to smile again,” Courtney said. “To be social and surrounded by people you love. To show up in the world. This painting was a reminder that you can hold multiple emotions at once, you can have space for intense joy and sadness simultanously.” There's something clever in its visual pun, and something profound in its vulnerability. 


Courtney’s series shows us that grief, like dough, is sticky, but fermentation, pickling, curing are all acts of faith in transformation. Courtney’s art urges us to allow the transformation to take place, and to allow grief to season our souls.





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