Donna Howell-Sickles is a very talented artist well known for figure paintings and drawings of western cowgirls with horses, dogs, and mythology. She lives in Saint Jo, Texas.
Donna’s work is in the collections of the Tucson Museum of Fine Art, The National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming as well as many private and corporate collections in the U.S. and Europe.
You can get more information at her website by clicking HERE.
From her website:
“We are pleased to announce the induction of Donna Howell-Sickles in to the National Cowgirl Museum & Hall of Fame in recognition of her work with imagery celebrating the cowgirl.
In the Western art genre, Donna Howell-Sickles has taken the image and idea of the cowgirl beyond charcoal lines and into reality. Howell-Sickles has been exploring the layers beneath the cowgirl’s engaging exterior for more than 30 years. A vintage postcard from the 1930’s featuring a cowgirl with ruby red lips sitting atop her horse instilled in Howell-Sickles a lasting fascination with the cowgirl spirit. The cowgirl in the postcard was at once both familiar and unreal. This dichotomy in the imagery has fueled Howell-Sickles’ artwork, and inspired her to create images of women that are both real and myth. Howell-Sickles’ artwork captures the quintessence and timelessness of the cowgirl
spirit.
“My fascination with the cowgirl image began in my last year of college. I received an old postcard from a friend in a typical art student trade. He brought over a large box of stuff including some of his own pottery. Near the bottom of the box were several old postcards, one of a cowgirl c. 1935 seated on a horse captioned “Greetings from a Real Cowgirl from the Ole Southwest”. The image spoke to me and I had no idea why. Although I had grown up on a farming ranching operation in Texas we never really thought of ourselves as Western. I surrendered to the attraction and as I used the Cowgirl in my art and I slowly filled in the blanks about my fascination with the imagery.”