gallery  |  artist  |  news  |  contact

ABOUT: Rosemary Lackey lives in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma with her husband Bill and his three cats. Rosemary and Bill have two grown daughters, one son-in-law, and two grandsons. ARTIST'S STATEMENT A painting is not a duplicate of something else. It is its own reality. Painting is my attempt to get at the heart of things, not just the heart of the subject, but the heart of me. This means that each painting is a journey to find and express my inner voice. It doesn't involve anything mysterious. It is not a mystical journey at all, but it is simply a real and practical exercise in getting in touch with my own senses--identifying and using the shapes, textures, and colors that reflect my inspiration for choosing the subject. My first art teacher was my mother. She was a ceramist and painter. My lessons under her were rarely formal, but I learned a lot by watching and by being allowed to play around with grown-up paints and brushes. During my teen years, I ignored the visual arts in pursuit of music, playing the piano and organ. In college, I majored in English, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in English and Education from the University of Central Oklahoma. And then, in my mid-30s, a passion to pursue painting hit me from out of the blue and grew stronger with each passing year. I was a busy mother in those days, and I mainly gratified my art interests by reading art technique books provided by the public library. I painted a backdrop for a children's program which led to painting murals on walls at friends' homes and at church. I designed and made large worship banners for church and traveled to other cities to give bannermaking workshops. While rewarding, none of that quite got at the heart of the matter for me. Then I enrolled in a class in the City Arts program in Oklahoma City taught by Bert Seabourn, and it has been like finding my artistic home! In addition to studying with Bert, I have been privileged to take a workshop with Kathryn Walker Richardson and have come to realize that, while I wasn't quite aware of it at the time, those library books gave me a strong foundation in the elements and principles of design. While I am now actively pursuing my own creative quest, I still enjoy viewing the works of others and reading and studying about art. During that process, I have collected the following favorite quotes: "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." --Scott Adams "The artist who paints the emotions creates an enclosed world--the picture--which, like a book, has the same interest no matter where it happens to be. Such an artist, we may imagine, spends a great deal of time doing nothing but looking, both around him and inside him." --Pierre Bonnard "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand." --Pablo Picasso "Have you never heard? Have you never understood? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of all the earth . . . No one can measure the depths of His understanding." --Isaiah 40:28