Carole Sikes Artist / Writer in Austin, Texas

IMAGE: WINTER SKY or VERTIGO 30" X 40" Oil on Canvas While painting this winter's sky above and beyong the leafless arbor, I discovered that the composition works in three positions. Turn it upside down or even vertically with the wall at the bottom. "Vertigo" seems an appropriate title and suggestive of my sensations while looking up to capture this image. It belongs to the series NATURE UP CLOSE and can be viewed in an alternate position (below) with the smaller paintings on paper.

ART EXHIBITIIONS:     At the KIMBELL MUSEUM in Fort Worth is a very fine exhibition entitled FROM THE PRIVATE COLLECTIONS OF TEXAS: EUROPEAN ART, ANCIENT TO MODERN. Many of the paintings and art pieces are on loan from heirs or museums around the country that received them from deceased collectors. I confess that I was not expecting the quality or the scope of this show. The 453 page catalog gives a comprehensive history of private collecting in Texas beginning in the mid nineteenth century. The art (mostly paintings) in these collections date from 700 B.C. through the 1940s. Interesting photographs of many of the homes in which these important paintings exist, or did exist in the past, is the bonus both in the exhibition and in the catalog.      Also in Fort Worth at the MODERN MUSEUM through Jan. 3: Don't miss paintings by SUSAN ROTHENBERG, an important contemporary painter. The Modern is just across the street from the Kimbell. A  MOVI...

UNTAMED 30" x 30" Oil on Canvas This is another large oil painting on canvas from my series that I'm calling NATURE UP CLOSE. The smaller works on paper from this series are posted below on earlier blogs. I'm hoping to exhibit some of these paintings at a future date. Perhaps there will be an opportunity to talk about my life-long belief that everyone who wishes can learn to see as painters and poets see. One can find interest and beauty in the ordinary -- the many things that we walk and drive by everyday without noticing. The first step is learning to see. I still remember our young children in the back seat on a car trip exclaiming, "Oh Dear, Mother and Dad have their ART EYES on again!"

CASSANDRA JAMES at Laguna Gloria's Gatehouse Gallery, 3809 West 35th Street, Austin, TX      This former teacher at AMOA School of Art will display some of her stunning oil paintings and her personal sketchbooks beginning Sunday November 15th, with a preview reception from 6-8 p.m.. The Gatehouse Gallery's hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. - 4 p.m. It's best to park outside the grounds and walk to the Gatehouse just inside the entrance to your left.      It is wonderful to have Cassandra and her husband Mark Bierner back in Austin. Charles and I have painted with Cassandra in Tuscany, North Carolina, and of course here in central Texas. I can assure you will be delighted with her work.      Quote by John Singer Sargent: "Sketch everything and keep your curiousity fresh."  Cassandra's sketch books will demonstrate that! KEVA RICHARDSON at The Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd in Austin   ...

     The list of writers who also paint is amazing. Among the 96 featured in THE WRITER'S BRUSH by DONALD FRIEDMAN are Aldous Huxley, Kurt Vonnegut, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williamns, Henry Miller, James Thurber, Annie Dillard, Beatrix Potter, Lawrence Durrell, Kahlil Gilbran, Victor Hugo, Jean Cocteau, ee Cummings, and others. There are 5 Nobel Laureates, 5 U.S. Poet Laureates, and numerous Pulitzer Prize and Natonal Book Award writers.      Perhaps you saw the 2007 CBS Sunday Morning News show about the exhibition that Friedman put together at Anita Shapolsky Gallery NYC. He states, "They (these writers) paint for many different reasons...all have so much creativity that no one medium can contain it."      The hard bound book is published by Mid-List Press, distributed by Random House and available at Amazon.com, new and used from $10. to $30.00.

CORRECTION     I thank you Dana for correcting my note regarding the Sydney Yeager portrait at AMOA. My apologies go to Austin artist/photographer George Krause. I incorrectly attributed his photograph to Chuck Close who is the feature artist in the current AMOA show. George Krause is represented in Austin at the dBerman Gallery. MUSEUM NEWS    Last month on National Public Radio I heard that a Graham Green unfinished and unpublished novel was discovered. Guess where? It was found in Austin in the University of Texas HUMANITIES RESEARCH COLLECTION (HRC). I confirmed this with director Tom Staley who had associate librarian Richard Workman call with details. The initial collection was acquired from the author before his death in 1991. It is a mystery story to be published in serial form in an English magazine that I believe is called The Strand.    Did you know that the erudite and enthusiastic new director of the BLANTON MUSEUM OF ...

No we have not been to the tropics, but Charles remarked that it "made him think of the tropics" or something like that. It's another in my series of NATURE UP CLOSE, painted in our studio (out of the Texas heat and without tropical mosquitoes). It's from a photo I took at Laguna Gloria Art Museum last spring.

AUSTIN ART MUSEUM EVENTS      The Francisco Matto exhibition at the Blanton Museum is a great one for taking your children and grandchildren. But hurry, the show comes down September 27, 2009. Enter the Univ. of Texas parking garage on M.L.K. Street next to the Blanton or park across the street adjacent to the Bob Bullock Museum. It was fun taking Michael (6) and Angela (9) who returned home, discussed the show with their parents and made drawings of what they saw. They especially liked Matto's found-wood totems.      Chuck Close's digital pigment prints are at Austin Museum of Art on Congress Ave. through November 8, 2009. The artist was asked why he didn't use more models when producing the huge frontal portrait heads. He replied that he didn't like people around. We can ask Austin artist Sydney Yeager about this. She was one of his subjects.  There is also a variety of work from AMOA's permanent collection. NETFLIX SUGGESTION...

I'm reading MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MODERN ART about Katharine Kuh ( 1904-1944, pronounced Coo, I think). She was curator for Art Institute of Chicago; before that a gallery owner and later a critic. As a child she had polio. Like FDR she overcame it although lived with pain and difficulty. She was friends with so many of the early 20th century painters of America and Europe. Her job as curator took her to museums and artist's studios all over the world. She talks about the thrill of seeking and acquring exceptional art (from collectors and elsewhere) for the museum. One of the most interesting and provocative of her quotes that has resonance with me is the discussion of looking and seeing..."quite different processes...and a prerequisite. We can learn to look but to see is another matter... Looking is an occular affair; seeing demands total integration, both concious and unconcious...Seeing is the result of intuition and knowledge, of concentration and dream, of strong emoti...

The following 6 images complete my "close-ups" from nature. My intention in these works on paper has been to make ordinary things appear extraordinary, or at least important. To see with the artist's eye means to find and concentrate on what attracts one to a subject or a scene. I have attempted to isolate what is attractive to me in each of the following examples. Often it is motion, perspective, color, line, shapes or shadows. All 12 works were photographed and then painted with oil on paper in my studio. Austin's recent triple digit temperatures have made plein aire work less appealing than working in the studio. Paintings are matted in white museum board, beveled and available for purchase. When matted the dimensions are 20 x 26.

Another two of my "close ups". Oil on Paper, matted the dimentions are 20 x 26.

New works on paper are available matted. Image sizes are 14 x 20 but matting will make the dimentions larger. More to follow these. When 16 are completed they will appear on the "Carole Sikes" portion of our www.sikesart.com web site under the tab "Works On Paper".

Above are 4 new works on paper that represent a change in my work routine. Images, shot with my camera on our property, were printed and used in the studio to inform my paintings. I am attempting to illustrate what attracted me to the subjects rather than to make a literal description. Some are more abstracted and provocative than others. It feels like a break-through and I expect post more.

Q. What has occupied my "art hours" this past fall and winter? A. Color studies based on exercises in two books, INTERACTION OF COLOR by Josef Albers and JOSEPF ALBERS: TO OPEN EYES written by two of his former students. Albers came to the U. S. from Nazi Germany when the Bauhaus was closed in 1933. A very important and influential teacher, he taught first in North Carolina and later at Yale where he headed the art department. Feeling the need "to stretch myself", I've spend time creating a work book with notes from these two books and making small color studies at my drawing board.

As a child of the fifties, I have always resonated to the work of artists and designers of the International style. However my art education was with regional painters at the University of Texas and my painting is reflective of this. We will see whether these studies will affect my future paintings.