Living Room Oil on canvas • 58" x 80"

Travelers Oil on canvas • 17" x 21"

Swings Oil on canvas • 40" x 50"

WORKS SOLD

About the Artist

Carolyn Young Hisel's paintings have been shown throughout the United States in many juried and invitational exhibitions. The Lexington, Kentucky native has had more than 20 solo exhibitions, including a 20-year retrospective in 1989 at Lexington's Headley-Whitney Museum. Her paintings have won a museum Purchase Award from the Owensboro Mid-States Competition, and an Al Smith Fellowship Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. Her work is part of several museum and corporate collections, including the University of Kentucky Art Museum. Hisel is a graduate of the University of Kentucky.

Artist's Statement

These paintings (in the exhibition, "Sunlit: New Paintings by Carolyn Young Hisel")have been made for all of us who have survived the first years of the 21st century,for the disaster victims, survivors of floods, tsunamis and terrorist attacks, for those who have lost sons to war, for those who have lost mothers to cancer, for myself.

The terrible continuum of images from television and newsstands has felt more and more overwhelming, and my soul cringes in the face of every NewsHour. I have responded the only way I can: with paintings and with visions of imagined friends in sunlit spaces, in rooms where music was played, where poems were read and flowers were arranged. I have painted walls around them that are vaporous and unconfining, and my spirit, at least temporarily, was consoled. I have tried to say, as eloquently as I am able, "Yes, but there is also this."

Carolyn Young Hisel, 2005