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Carol Fairlie

Ms. Fairlie is a Professor of Art at Sul Ross State University where she teaches watercolor, oil painting, drawing, figure drawing, and printmaking. She studied painting for four years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Texas Woman's University and her Master of Fine Arts at the University of North Texas, School of Visual Arts.

Nationally recognized, Fairlie has had numerous solo exhibitions and has shown her work in many juried national exhibitions including Watercolor USA, the National Watercolor Society, the Philadelphia Watercolor Society and the Arizona Aqueous. She was recently on the Board of Directors for the National Watercolor Society as Newsletter editor and holds signature status in the Philadelphia Watercolor Society and in the Watercolor Art Society Houston. She received an Honored Alumni Award from the University of North Texas, School of Visual Arts in 2003. She has extensive experience as a juror of exhibitions and teaching workshops.

Her work is represented privately in the USA, Mexico, Japan, and the Czech Republic and included in the collection of Merrill Lynch Corporation, Tetra Pak Corporation (Sweden), the Mary Kaye Family, Sul Ross State University and the Houton Oil Company.

Light, color and atmosphere are an integral aspect in her paintings. Trained to paint in a traditional manner and strongly influenced by the 1970's school of Figurative Realism, her interest in direct observation of architectural space led to a fascination with grand Hotels. Using photographic compilations superimposed with contemporary analogies and metaphors and dream imagery, she creates realistic seeming interiors. Recently, her photo realistic use of glass reflections combine the subtle interplay of abstract space, both in and on glass, with its many convoluted layers and natural abstraction of color, alluding to the duality of space one finds in dreams. Ms. Fairlie creates a vision that attempts to place the viewer in a dream world and, as in a dream, one rarely questions the altered distortions of a reflection.

To see Carol making art in her Alpine, Texas studio, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz6OQUtcZOw&list=PL7kG7tderHcMZZDwITvRlyCj8LqAMbLQh&index=3&t=0s

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