Carrie Fell
“Wisdom Bringers” expand her horizons
Carrie Fell’s visually and emotionally stunning paintings — peopled with faceless galloping cowboys, purple and gold horses, and fuchsia buffalo — are easily recognized in any home or gallery. Her personal journey as an artist and a woman of the West may be less straightforward, but it too is expressed in her work. And now that path has taken an important new turn.
“The responsibility of the artist is to not always stay the same, but instead find new ways to evolve the work,” she explains. “It’s a personal journey you are trying to convey through the work to collectors, and I take a real responsibility for that.”
A searcher all her life, Fell’s vivid images of cowboys embody her own seeking nature, always restlessly moving on and moving forward in life and in spirit. But when the artist
recently made a physical move from the Denver-area urban environment where she had lived for decades into a country home on five acres in the wide open spaces of Parker, Colorado, little did she know she had unwittingly embarked on an important artistic shift as well.
Hearing about the history of her new property from the previous owners who had found Indian arrowheads onsite led Fell into her own compelling research on Native Americans. She learned her land had been part of their tribal migration trail for centuries, and soon those long-ago homesteaders began to inhabit her thoughts along with the symbolic animals — rabbit, bird, deer, bear — that link to human behavior in native traditions. Oddly, before she even bought the property, the topic of Indians had come up with a Western art collector’s request that Fell try her hand at painting them.
But Fell, a blonde American at home in her modern milieu, resisted. “I thought since I didn’t have a true connection to that heritage, it wasn’t really authentic for me to paint them,” she says. The collector countered by listing all the Western artists lacking Native American blood who nevertheless painted Indians, at the same time pointing out that Fell didn’t seem to think she actually needed to be a cowboy to paint them.
The artist had to agree. All the reasons why she didn’t paint Indians slowly crumbled away as she found herself increasingly intrigued by the Lakota Sioux, a tribe whose peaceable nature echoed her own. “I was impressed by their reverence for everything, their respect for the land, the sun and moon and the animals,” she says. “Everything had purpose and meaning, and they never wasted anything.”
She also saw something in the chiefs’ faces that transcended our jittery world beset with the blaring panic of a nonstop 24/7 news cycle. Here were a noble people who met the painful dimming of their culture with calm endurance and acceptance, though often their faces held sadness too. Fell began to call the chiefs she was painting, “wisdom bringers.” 
Whereas her cowboys’ role as fictional symbols of the West is best served by painting them in faceless mystery, the Indian chiefs are individuals whose souls the artist felt she must express in the strong features which dominate each portrait. And as she painted them, she came to know them. “They bring that wisdom into my life; in a way they kind of talk to me as I paint them and spend time with them.”
But as she introduced them to the art world, Fell heard negative murmurs. Her wisdom bringers looked “menacing,” some said, and the galleries seemed nervous about their reception. By the time of their unveiling at the Galerie Zuger in Santa Fe last year, the artist was beyond nervous — until she sold one of the paintings to an admirer as she was unloading it off the truck to take 
into the gallery. “At that moment, there was that energy saying, okay, I think you’re on the right track,” she muses. Her other new work, abstract interpretations of the trade blankets she’d discovered through her research, seemed to gently lace together the images of cowboys and wisdom bringer chiefs.
The success of her Indian portraits confirms the universality of the artist’s intuitive feelings about this profound people and their connection to our own edgy lives and times. “It’s about the human condition; the land, the earth…God or the Supreme Being. I want people to feel inside what the chief is feeling on his face: he may be brave, sad, or worried, but he will endure regardless of what comes. Regardless of the fate that befell them, they stood for what they felt. That is truly what America is.”
Joy Overbeck is a regular contributor to Vail-Beaver Creek Magazine. Her work has appeared in Redbook, Health, Parents, Woman’s Day, TV Guide, Colorado Expression, 5280 Magazine, and more. She is also the author of three books.
