"High Sprited Cowgirls"
The art of Donna Howell-Sickles
by Judy Archibald
Wildlife Art • May/June 2006
The Cowgirls in Donna Howell-Sickles paintings dance through life in joyous abandonment, exploding off the canvas in spontaneous action and vibrant colors. These Red Horse Riders flirt with cowboys, tame bulls and run with wild horses. They are self-confident, saucy women who live life to the fullest. “Instead of passively watching their dogs jump,” she says, “They jump with their dogs.”
For Howell-Sickles, inspiration comes from combining her passion for Greek and romantic literature with a quirky sense of humor, which sparks paintings that mix cowgirl imagery with mythology. While the painting And the Cowgirl Jumped over the Moon suggests a nursery rhyme, to Howell-Sickles it illustrates a cowgirl’s empowerment. “In an echo of bull-leaping ceremonies practiced in ancient Crete, the cowgirl takes on the power of the moon, which is echoed in the round shape behind her and the crescent horns of the oxen,” she explains. “Her boots are decorated with the five-pointed star and the flower with eight petals.”
In Legends, a painting of a cowgirl strutting alongside a grizzly bear, she celebrates the cycle of life with full moons painted on the cowgirl’s chaps, and stars on her scarf. “She follows the path of the bear’s cyclical rebirth,” says Howell-Sickles. “Different cultures and myths form the tapestry of this painting, all referring to the Big Dipper, sometimes seen as the bear, and its reappearance in the night sky. The panels in the background are drawn from Micmac Indian tradition, where the bear, or the Big Dipper, was thought to be chased through the sky by seven hungry birds. It is the robin that finally vanquishes the bear, and its breast and the leaf of the nearby maple are stained with the bear’s blood. The reappearance of the bear from hibernation was, in many cultures, proof of the cycle of life.”
While the deeper meanings in many of Howell-Sickles’ paintings are not always readily apparent, joy and vitality are. In the 1980s after viewing so much artwork in museums and art galleries that focused on anger, sorrow and despair, Howell-Sickles made a conscious decision to portray the joyous aspect of life. “Every now and then a person has a flash when they realize they are really happy,” she says. “My work celebrates those good feelings.”
Old Postcard Sets Tone
Howell-Sickles, 56, first got the idea of painting cowgirl images in 1972 when a friend gave her an old postcard from the 1930s bearing the image of a genuine cowgirl wearing a hat, chaps and boots, riding a sorrel horse. The caption read, “Greetings from a real cowgirl of the ole Southwest.” The hand-tinted color on the postcard had been imprinted over the top of a black-and-white photograph, but it was slightly out of kilter making the cowgirl’s bright red lips off-center. This fake/real illusory aspect of the woman fascinated Howell-Sickles. “The cowgirl seemed to me to be a wonderful, fake glamorized image – something someone just made up,” she says. “Surely, she could not be real.”
Totally captivated by the woman on the postcard, Howell-Sickles used the fake/real aspect in the paintings she created between 1972 and 1978. However, these cowgirls had little or no facial features, projecting Western persona rather than distinct personalities. By 1979 she was focusing entirely on painting cowgirls and learned that there has been “real” cowgirls who wore bright costumes and traveled all over the world during the early 1900s, riding bucking broncs and bulls in front of cheering audiences. A retired rodeo star of the 1920s told the artist that no matter how late the hour how tired the performers were, “they were never too tired to dance,” inspiring several paintings of cowgirls dancing – with cowboys, dogs, horses and each other.
As the spirited, courageous and fun-loving cowgirls of the past came to life in Howell-Sickles’ mind, they also sprang to life in paintings with real faces, laughing eyes and self-confident smiles. The cowgirls took on a life of their own as the artist explored spiritual and emotional concepts that touched on all eras. Slowly, the high-spirited cowgirls in traditional western gear evolved into stylized symbols for contemporary women, and the physical events of the rodeo – roping, riding and bulldogging – became metaphors for the challenges they face.
The painting Standing with the Boys depicts a cowgirl with prized longhorns – both are symbols of the American West – and “both are tough, resourceful, beautiful and hardheaded,” explains Howell-Sickles.
In Roller Coaster: Nothing but Blue Sky, the cowgirl, who is tossed upside down in the air above two red bucking horses, is a metaphor for the process that is life. “Sometimes you need to fall to find the key,” say Howell-Sickles. “We can still be a joyous spirit even on the back of the uncontrollable forces of life.”
Because each completed painting is such a unique combination of reality and imagination, the cowgirls rarely resemble any model. Instead, even though they span all ages of a woman’s life, with their vivacious smiles, exuberance and body language, they bear a striking physical resemblance to Howell-Sickles. However, it is the cowgirl’s inner spirit she identifies with.
“I don’t think of myself as a cowgirl,” she says, “but a woman of the West with an independent, self-reliant, go-for-it attitude.
Bold Colors and Shapes
Bold colors, dramatic shapes and charcoal lines purposely left smeared are not held captive by imaginary borders but extend beyond the edges, which give the cowgirls a sense of drama and uninhibited movement. “Composition and energy are more important in a painting than anatomy,” she says. “Sometimes, I leave out the legs of a horse because they aren’t really necessary to define the animal.” At other times the legs of a horse may be the only parts visible, and its color is just as often an unreal shade of yellow or brilliant red.
In addition to painting her horses red, Howell-Sickles uses the color to accent lips, hats, kerchiefs, boots, even dogs “because it is joyous, mythological and magical. Blood is red, it represents the color of life,” she says. “In the early ages churches and artists used red to symbolize royalty and divinity.” The number thee in a painting, such as in Leading the Horses to Water, is often symbolic – as in mythology, three meant good luck and has been used to symbolize completion.
Though Howell-Sickles’ cowgirls flirt across a horizon of blue because the color implies the outdoors without requiring detail, it isn’t always the same shade. To attain just the right color for a particular feeling as in Learning to Kick Back, she may try seven or eight different shades of blue until finding the one that “rings with excitement.”
A consummate storyteller, Howell-Sickles uses a combination of mediums – acrylic, pastel, charcoal, Prismacolor and oil paints – to bring cowgirls to life. “There is more energy ion a piece when you can see some of the canvas, some of the lines and paint,” she says. “It is that combination that adds life, movement and spontaneity.”
While the scale of her finished work is large, usually 40-by-60-inches, she generally begins by making small sketches before moving to a larger size paper or canvas, where she lets her entire body become involved in the process. Even in beginning drawing classes, I don’t remember being attracted to little things that you just have to move your hand to draw,” she says. “Getting totally involved with the media and moving around the entire surface is what appeals to me.”
Since 1982, when a gallery in Dallas first began representing her, the success and popularity of Howell-Sickles’ cowgirls has been overwhelming. She has had dozens of one-woman shoes, has been the featured artist for the American Women Artist show, and her works are in the collections of the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, Ft. Worth, Texas; the Tucson Museum of Art, Ariz.; the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, Wyo., and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyo.
Texas Roots
Born on a farm in Gainesville, Texas, Howell-Sickles has lived most of her adult life in the Lone Star State. The early years were spent on an 850-acre cattle ranch along the Red River, where she rode horses, hiked and observed animals.
Then the farm economy spiraled downward, both of her parents returned to college to become teachers and it was assumed teaching would also be Howell-Sickles’ career. She enrolled as an education major at Texas Tech in Lubbock, but after two years, a required art course where she painted large abstract pieces changed her life. “There was literally no subject matter for me other that the language of paint,” she says.
After graduating with a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1972, she moved to Seattle, where she worked in a variety of positions, including visiting artist for the Washington State Arts Commission. Missing wide open spaces, she returned to Texas in 1979. She credits marrying John Sickles in 1980 as a major turning point in her career. “He believed in my work and gave me emotional; support and the opportunity to paint full time.”
The couple lives in the small Texas community of Saint Jo with three dogs that jump a lot, like the ones in her paintings, and also own a 500-acre ranch 20 miles from Gainesville that is enrolled in a Texas wildlife program. Instead of raising horses and cattle, John is restoring prairie grasses and wetlands,” she says with pride.
Her large studio, a converted car barn that looks out on tall stalks of corn and red-winged blackbirds, is divided into a clean area – an office hung with artwork and filled with books on mythology, religion and art – and a working area, where she has as many as six different paintings in progress at one time.
Through an eclectic mix of media and metaphor, Howell-Sickles has turned the traditional independent cowgirl into a symbolic joyful heroine for contemporary women of all ages.
link to images: http://www.mclarryfineart.com/donnahowellsickles.html