by Jamey Landry

“I lived in Oklahoma for sixteen years,” our cover artist, Carol Hallock, told me, and I began to lose interest in this line of questioning. No offense to Carol, who is as charming and witty and interesting a person as you would ever want to meet. But I just zoned out at the word “Oklahoma.” I lived in a small town in western Oklahoma when my dad was stationed there in the Air Force and still have mixed feelings about the experience. Even the Chamber of Commerce conceded the town was probably not the dream destination of many of the people there, but they made the best of it with the tongue-in-cheek “Happiness is Altus, OK In Your Rearview Mirror” bumper stickers they issued.

“So did the abject boredom of living in Oklahoma motivate you to become a better painter?” I asked with all due sincerity, because in my Oklahoma experience, watching the paint dry on the canvas would have indeed been a headline event. Carol laughed and took pity on me, then bragged that she and her husband lived in eastern Oklahoma near the Arkansas border, which the Sooners call “Green Country.” We laughed and traded Oklahoma jokes, but Carol then explained that her real motivation to rekindle her art career was her old job.

“I got a bad job at the post office, and it was so crummy I had to quit,” Carol said. “I just got fed up and I said ‘Shoot, I’m going back to what I really am.’” I zoned back in at that, delighted in a perverse way to learn that this sweet, very together lady had found what has to be the most creative way of literally “going postal”: she painted her frustrations out! We both laughed when I pointed that out to her!

As we spoke further, Carol shared that she studied art in high school and college. Originally from Baton Rouge, she attended Tara High, and then later went to LSU. At the time, in the late 1970s, there was a tendency to push college art majors to “think outside the box” and discourage more conventional styles of art, according to Carol. That thinking rubbed her the wrong way—so much so that she doubted her talent and lost her enthusiasm for art because so called “experts” chided her work for being too realistic and too literal.

“I quit painting for a long time,” Carol recalled. “In college, they wanted you to paint ‘out of the box’ without telling you what the ‘box’ you’re supposed to paint out of is. I’m not like that. I don’t pull crazy stuff out of my head like that, so they made me think there was something wrong with me being an artist and that I was no good.” So Carol eventually traded one palette for another.

Jump forward in time several years and you would find Carol tending the gardens on the Hallocks’ five-acre plot in Oklahoma, expressing herself using nature’s palette. One could joke it was the Hallocks’ own “Green Acres,” in reference to the 1960s sitcom about New York socialites chucking it all to live on a farm in rural America. “We were a couple of city slickers for sure!” Carol giggled, as she recalled the experience. “We had every kind of animal you could imagine!”

After the Hallocks moved back to Louisiana in 2004, they settled in Lacombe, near water, which was a dream come true for Carol after being landlocked for so long in Oklahoma. Like so many others, Carol finds the Louisiana landscape a source of inspiration. “I paint Louisiana here. I love it here. We’d been gone a really long time, and when we came back all I could see was trees and waterfronts. My eyes cannot get enough of the old cypress trees, live oaks, tropical plants and all the water scenes. I live on a bayou, so my neighbors are fair game for my boat paintings. They see me walking out with my easel and must think ‘Oh, no! Here comes Carol again!’”

Those trees, waterfronts and other landscape features she sees lend themselves well to Carol’s artistic style, which she describes as expressionism and realistic impressionism. She says, “I like to paint representational subjects with a loose brush stroke. It fascinates me to see that what appears to be a detailed painting when viewed from a distance is actually almost abstract when viewed up close.”

Painting in oils, she is proud of the fact that she rarely paints from photographs. In her opinion, photographs “lie” because all of the subject matter in the foreground is in sharp focus. However, the eye has “selective focus,” where the brain selectively puts objects in and out of focus as the subject of interest changes.

“A photograph isn’t really how we see. It’s how the camera sees. I try to paint as we see. When we focus on an object, we see the focal point in detail and everything around it is softened to almost a blur. This is why it is important to paint from life—we can paint what we actually see, unlike painting from a photo where usually everything is in sharp detail.” And the life she paints is most often tropical.

Although her Louisiana landscapes sell well, it is her tropical paintings, such as the one that graces our cover, that have been big sellers for Carol. “We went on vacation to Florida every year when I was a kid, and the tropical scenes bring back great memories. I still take my vacations in Florida and Mexico as well, so I tend to do quite a bit of tropical scenes. They are feel-good paintings and people like them.”

Summing up her own work, Carol says, “I try to emphasize color and contrast in my work with just enough balance between the two to reach out to the viewer and bring them in for a closer look. I want the viewer to be touched by the feeling that the painting evokes.”

Carol’s work is displayed at Fort Isabel Gallery, 502 N. Columbia in Covington, 892-1841. Her art is also shown in Fort Smith, Arkansas and at local festivals. Selected prints are published and distributed nationally by Sunset Marketing. Visit Carol’s website at www.carolhallock.com.