DONNA
HOWELL-SICKLES
Radiant
energy is the first thing most people notice about
one of Donna Howell-Sickles’ mixed media works.
The energy comes partly from the sizzling lines
and the dynamic compositions, but mostly from the
personalities of her primary subjects, American
cowgirls. Howell-Sickles is a supremely gifted draftsman
who sketches in the details of these women’s lives
with swift, sure strokes. No matter how wild her
visual ideas get, they remain believable because
they are so perfectly rendered. Each knot in a bandanna
or angle of a boot is true to life. The human form
is utterly accurate. Every hair blows in the wind
exactly as it does in the real outdoors.
Howell-Sickles
creates plenty of neutral space in her compositions
in order to allow reflection and breathing room.
She sometimes paints a mat-like border around the
edges, then deliberately breaks into it with form
and line to indicate boundaries crossed and ideas
outside convention. She adds mythological and symbolic
elements that create mystery as they tease the mind
with possible meanings just beyond the realm of
logic, and she mixes them with everyday images to
heighten their incongruity.
Howell-Sickles
cannot remember a time when she was not drawing.
She grew up on a ranch near the Red River in North
Texas, and her first subjects were the animals that
she was around every day. By the time she reached
adulthood, she was already thoroughly familiar with
the wild and tame creatures in the vicinity. She
went off to college in the 1970s, where she took
art courses and observed the large social changes
during that decade. One such movement was the rise
of women’s equality.
A
chance encounter with an old postcard of a rodeo
cowgirl galvanized her. She realized that these
women were ahead of their time in their independent,
autonomous attitudes. They literally held the reins.
As she began to research these bygone figures, with
their fancy attire and their brisk demeanor, Howell-Sickles
realized that their heyday had come and gone, faded
like the postcards that depicted them in their prime.
She began to research them in earnest, and she found
that they provided an inexhaustible metaphor for
all that is admirable about the ranching women of
yesterday and today. Her art career continued to
develop as she married and had a daughter, and gradually
her cowgirl imagery began to encompass all that
is feminine, warm, wise, funny, and powerful.
Howell-Sickles’
art is among the subtlest and most complex work
being produced in the Western genre today. Her technique
is deceptively simple at first glance, projecting
a lightness of spirit that allows her ideas to breathe.
She populates her images with all manner of creatures—horses,
cattle, herds of deer, companionable dogs, huge
docile bears—that bring to the picture an element
of kinship with nature. Having established a strong,
bright, lively idea, she then proceeds to go straight
past the external details. With an indefinable alchemy,
she creates an exact portrait of the free spirit
of the Western cowgirl.
