The Ann Tower Gallery is pleased to present Sunlit: New Figurative Work by Carolyn Young Hisel, an exhibition of 18 paintings made over the past two years. This will be Hisel's first solo exhibition in Lexington in several years. Please join us for a Gallery Hop Reception with the artist on Friday, November 18th, from 5 – 8pm. The exhibition will be on display through February 5, 2006.

As the title suggests, Hisel's newest paintings signal a return to the figure. She depicts "visions of imagined friends in sunlit spaces where music was played, where poems were read and flowers were arranged. I have painted walls around them that are vaporous and unconfining…" These rich and meditative paintings are the artist's response to the pain-filled world of the 21st–century and the gruesome images that pummel us daily. Hisel is not pretending that hopelessness and destruction do not exist, but rather, she's reminding herself and us that reality also includes beauty and goodness, and that art, both the making and the viewing of it, has the power to console our spirits in the worst of times.

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, and her work is part of several museum and corporate collections. Hisel is a graduate of the University of Kentucky.