About The Author
About The Author
Carolyn Boettner
My Color Art Share The Love
Before Carolyn Boettner ever held a paintbrush, she held a dirt clod.
She was born in Pampa, Texas, into a family that had almost nothing — no money for pencils, none for paper. For a little girl who needed to draw the way other children need to run, that could have been the end of the story. Instead, she went out into the yard, found clods of hardened dirt, and dragged them across the concrete until the patterns in her head had somewhere to go.
When the family could finally afford pencils, she tore grocery bags open at the seams and pressed them flat, and those brown paper sheets became her first sketchbooks. She never once called herself deprived. She had simply figured out, earlier than most people ever do, that beauty doesn’t wait for permission — or for supplies.
The road from that concrete slab was a long one. Texas gave way to Orange County, California, where she spent her teenage years. There were hard chapters too — a difficult season in Bakersfield that she carried quietly and came through anyway. And then came the turn that changed everything: a new beginning, and Roger Boettner, and fifty years of a life built side by side.
Their last chapter together was Kirkwood Cottage, and it was there that everything she’d been reaching for since childhood finally had room to bloom. Her studio window didn’t just look out on a garden — it looked into a world where nature and art were the same thing. The delicate florals, the vines, the “Lady of the Forest”: all of it came from a woman sitting in the peace she had spent a lifetime earning, drawing what she loved with tools her younger self could only have dreamed of.
Roger is sharing her work now because she was never one to keep it. Carolyn gave her drawings away, cheered on the shakiest beginner in the room, and believed with her whole heart that talent is meant to be handed around, not hoarded. These pages spent years in her studio and in the hands of the people lucky enough to know her — but they were never meant to stay there. So he’s opening the door. What you’re looking at is a gift from Carolyn’s world to yours, still doing exactly what she always did with it: reaching people, quieting them, and inviting them to sit down, take a breath, and make something beautiful.
And somewhere out there is a kid with nothing but dirt and determination. This is for her, too.
