Ghost Tree Painting

A native of New Orleans and long-time resident of Baton Rouge, Pam Kelly Sills was educated at Newcomb College, Tulane University; Yale University’s prestigious Norfolk School of Music and Art; and received an MFA from the University of New Orleans. Sills work is about color, structure, and pattern capturing the vitality and freshness of landscapes or botanical imagery. Embedded within the (sometimes abstract other times representational) work is a personal symbolism about life, struggle, pain, or pleasure. Plants and gardens serve as visual metaphors expressing conflicting feelings about freedom and restraint in the human condition. Often created with loose brushwork in vibrant color and texture, my paintings and drawings begin with images based on my own photographs and drawings. They are later more fully developed on paper or canvas. Working with gestures in ink on absorbent paper or in loose oil crayon studies, I employ line and mass to create spatial relationships. Beginning with thin washes and then layering wet into wet on canvas or panels, her paintings evolve, in all or part, from representation to abstraction until a solution asserts itself. It is a process of inclusion and exclusion, balance, and instability. Sills’ paintings involve the spectator with lessons learned from the achievement of others, as well as her own experiences and discoveries. Her work continues to reference nature ̶ lush landscapes and botanical imagery. It owes much to the examples of Van Gogh and Matisse, and more contemporary sources including Hodgkin and Hockney. She has taught drawing, painting and art history at the University of New Orleans, Delgado Community College, and at several New Orleans preparatory schools. She has also been a guest lecturer at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Sills began exhibiting professionally in St. Louis in the mid-seventies. Since then, her work has been shown in several one-person exhibitions and numerous competitive, group and invitational exhibits. Her work is represented in many private and public and corporate collections. These include The Arts Council of New Orleans; The Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) Center for the Visual Arts; Children’s Hospital in New Orleans; City Club Incorporated in Miami, Florida; Freeport-McMoran Company Incorporated, New Orleans; Marriott Marquis Hotel, Atlanta; Pan American Life Center, Pan Pacific, Singapore; and the Stouffer Waverly Atlanta.