BIOGRAPHY

Carol Lindsley was born in southern California, where she grew up immersed in her mother's love of art. An accomplished watercolorist, Carol's mother worked professionally for more than four decades as a scenic designer. It is largely to this childhood background that Carol attributes her own early commitment to art.
At UCLA Carol studied art history, with a special interest in modernism. She was fascinated with the evolution of abstraction in modernism and its indebtedness to the arts of Africa and Native America. At the same time, she was painting portraits of her friends.
Carol moved north to the San Francisco Bay Area, a prominent national art center, for graduate school at Berkeley. Not long after, she began work as curator of Reese Palley Gallery in San Francisco and New York. Much of her time was spent in artists' studios, museums, and galleries, and she moved to the east coast permanently when she realized she wanted to paint professionally.
She rented a loft studio in New York's SoHo district, and supported herself by working in the bookstore at The Museum of Modern Art. Breaks were spent in the museum's galleries, studying every aspect of MoMA's landmark collection. With many artist friends in New York, she exchanged studio visits to critique one another's work. It was suggested that she apply for an artist's grant with the National Endowment for the Arts, and she received the much-coveted award in 1977.
For several years Carol painted and exhibited subtly textured oil abstractions in elliptical shapes for which she became best known. Then in the autumn of 2003, following the death of her mother, she decided to make a scenic cross-country drive from southern California to the east, notably including Santa Fe and the southwest. The trip unexpectedly turned into a life-transforming experience. Carol was deeply impressed by the dramatic and colorful landscapes of the area, and excited both visually and intellectually by the Native American artifacts she discovered in the galleries and museums of Santa Fe, Taos, and Albuquerque.
The most significant impact of the trip was that Carol returned to her studio in Baltimore and immediately launched a new series of paintings of historic Native American artifacts, including pottery, katsinam, beaded pouches and moccasins, and other powerful pieces.
Carol highlighted the inspirational aspects of the artifacts by translating them into painted life. She paints with meticulous care and skill to suggest every bead, to capture the softness of tanned hide, and to convey the aged but still glowing colors of the painted-cottonwood kachina.
Carol wants to present these artifacts with aesthetic integrity and historical accuracy. She purposely chooses not to romanticize the artifacts by staging them in artificial settings. Rather, Carol is committed to depiction both direct and eloquent, in homage to the spirit of the artifacts' makers.