Caroline Hekate

Originally written for class (Fall 2015)

Angrily scratching circles into a new piece of paper, she cast aside her failed masterpiece and brought the new one, the one that showed nothing but frustration, to her mother Ileana. Then, she was only a few years old. It’s the first time she remembers working on art.

         

Caroline Hekate working in Lettuce Lake Park in Tampa

   She took piece to her mother and sarcastically asked, “Look at this, isn’t it cute?” Her anger only skyrocketed when Ileana told her ‘yes’ since she knew she didn’t try. Now, she looks back on it and sees growth. She’s no longer so hard on herself about mistakes with her art, or at least she tries not to be.

As a small child Ingrid Caroline Moran Escoto wanted to copy and paste things from the world and put them on her drawing paper. In the years since she changed her public name to Caroline Hekate and now uses the world as inspiration in place of replication. “I want to create something new,” Caroline explains. “I don’t want to make recycled material.”

Caroline now expresses her art in painting, drawing, photography, film and belly dance. When it comes to art, Caroline is a modern-day Renaissance woman. To put it simply Caroline says, “As a kid, I had trouble choosing one thing I really liked. That’s carried over into my adult life.” She tries to focus most of her energy on painting, drawing and photography, but focus is one of her most difficult challenges.

Today, she gets out of her van, unpacks her foldable easel, tripod, camera and backpack from the back and leans out from behind it to wave hello. Her reddish brown hair glints in the little bit of sunlight that makes it through the trees to the ground.

She walks straight back onto the nearest wooded path, but makes a wrong turn and has to change course after a minute of walking. At the end of this second path is her usual spot.

The spot Caroline has selected is in a small break in the woods where there is a marshy pond and some logs to sit on. Surprisingly, she sets up her easel facing away from the water. She angles the easel a little more and her reasoning becomes clear: there’s a small patch of bright light streaming through the trees right onto the mostly done drawing she clips onto the easel.

Caroline leans her slim 25-year-old frame over her tripod and her dangly earrings with their blue gems tilt at a 45 degree angle from her body. The camera records as a silent observer to her work in Lettuce Lake Park. This is one of her favorite places to come for inspiration. It’s still in Tampa, but it feels like you’re out in the [tropical] countryside.

The park is her studio today because she’s moving back to Boston soon and no longer has studio space in Tampa. Boston is more of a home to Caroline. She’s also spent time in several Florida cities growing up and also lived part of her life in Honduras as a child before her parents divorced. While she was born in Boston and spent most of her life stateside, unlike her younger sister who attends school in Honduras, Caroline still speaks with a hint of an accent in her voice.

She shares her history in a childlike way with a hundred thoughts trying to surface at once as she plays with twigs on the ground. She jumps from the past to the present and back again in one breath, but a deep sense of wisdom seems to hang on her words.

After her parents divorced in the mid 1990s, Caroline spent her childhood switching homes. Her parents had no other children together and so Caroline experienced this rotation in solitude. In her early years after the divorce, she was given the go-ahead for her creativity and began to experience the world through art while maintaining other interests, like science.

She tried dancing the first time at 6-years-old with classical ballet, but abandoned it for other things until she turned 20-years-old and took up dance again. “I never took a belly dance class. I guess that’s where my pride came in. I connected with belly dance and didn’t want anyone to tell me what to do.” As an adult named Caroline, spunky Ingrid still shows through.

“I was absolutely mesmerized by her belly dancing,” says Samantha Brennan, a junior at the University of Tampa who saw Caroline perform at a tattoo convention. “She made such fluid, elegant movements and she had this chilling background music that made your skin crawl.”

Caroline’s life wasn’t stable, but not in a way that made her feel unsafe or unloved. More than anything she struggled to make memorable friendships since she wasn’t in one place for very long. Art tended to fill that space in her life. Her family also tried out many religions as she grew up starting out as Roman Catholics, then Evangelist converts, then Baptists, then Pentecostals. “I had no long-term friends, no long-term anything, but I had time to figure out myself,” Caroline explains.

Caroline certainly has differentiated herself from others. She wears a small pentagram necklace and a clear, shiny crystal necklace over her almost entirely black outfit. Her dark eyes stand out from her even darker eye makeup and her lip ring is the only part of her face visible when she kneels, leaning into her easel while her hair hangs down like a curtain. Her black combat boots twist in behind her to form a seat for when she finally leans backwards to take a quick break from her drawing.

Today she is working on finishing an ink drawing piece she began in September, or maybe October, that is based on the astrological signs. Caroline is an Aries and the day she began the project she started with Libra. “Libra is my opposite and I was feeling in a place where that made sense. I always study my feelings like a scientist and see how to relate feelings into a physical art.”

The piece is a part of a collection she’s working on called Sanctuary. Once all of the pieces are done, they will resemble cathedral windows together and show a love-balance between male and female energies. Like a mantra to herself Caroline repeats, “That’s what love is. The balance between female and male energies. That’s what love is.”

Astrology will be readily represented in this collection, but so will alchemy, occult, mathematics, Hinduism and even yogi principles. It will likely debut in Boston. She doesn’t know when it will be ready just yet, but she knows that it will be. “I’m really trying to do this one thing with discipline,” Caroline says. “When I work on too many things nothing gets done. My science friends tell me ‘Humans aren’t meant to multitask.’ We need to focus our energy on one thing.”

Caroline no longer follows a specific religion, but she learns the beliefs of others and often likes to incorporate them into her artwork. She once met a Hindu sage that turned her attention to vegetarianism. “I’m trying to be vegetarian,” Caroline shares. “And that’s very hard with a Latin American family. They know I’m vegetarian and they’re still like ‘You want some meat?’”

Even with the pressure to eat meat, Caroline still agrees with the sage that asked her, “Why am I going to put something deadly into my body if I am not dead yet?” regarding animals killed for food. She says that around this point in her personal journey she realized animals had souls and she couldn’t continue eating them.

This realization occurred around the same time that Caroline took on college. She started at 20-years-old and went for three years. To please her parents, Ileana and Abraham, she started off with a Business Administration major but quickly changed to Art.

Even still, it didn’t feel quite right. She was learning technique. And learning technique. And some more technique. “I didn’t feel challenged,” Caroline says. “I had been doing that since I was a kid.” It was then she started her company Lunam Art and began to pursue art full-time.

Her parents “reacted with a pause” to Caroline’s announcement that she was leaving school and choosing art over practicality. However, Caroline and college just weren’t a match. “College felt like ‘Man, I’m in the 16^th grade.’”

Her parents were worried about her financial stability; and Caroline worried about it at first too and hated money because it was getting in the way. But, Caroline changed her frame of mind. She now says, “The more you hate something, the more power it has over you.” Her parents quickly got behind her decision and now give advice when they can.

Caroline absentmindedly fiddles with the crystal on her necklace as she pulls her marker away from the page to give thought to where her next marks should go. She’s in the shading stage of this piece: too much and it will look like a black blob, too little and it will look unfinished. Like the theme of the piece, she needs to find the right balance.

“I’m not looking to be a saint,” Caroline explains. “I’m not looking to be perfect. I’m looking to be comfortable and my comfort may be uncomfortable to others.