Carol Lukitsch grew up in Colorado with a strong awareness of the natural world. When the view from your high school includes the Rocky Mountains with the majestic Pikes Peak and the red rocks in the Garden of the Gods, your artwork is destined to be inspired by nature.
Later, while residing for three years on the small island of Okinawa, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea, nature again was experienced as an inner landscape. The artist paInts nature’s cycles and forces, its capacity both as refuge and as threat. She was influenced by Asian art with its use of natural imagery as a metaphor for human loss, passage and regeneration.
Lukitsch and her family have travelled extensively and lived in several parts of the world. Her work reflects that transience and movement. In 2020 they relocated from the East Coast of the United States to Florida’s Gulf of Mexico. Her current work explores the enigma of being “sequestered in paradise” while the world is endangered and chaotic. Staying balanced while existing in a state of flux is a major goal of her work.
Carol Lukitsch works primarily in oils, but also in acrylics and mixed media, including photo collage. She often works on archival, cradled birch wood panels of various sizes. The panels do not require framing and can be arranged according to preference and available space. It is an open ended and transformative process.
Carol Lukitsch lives and works in Cortez, Florida near Sarasota Bay. She has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally in over 100 solo and group exhibitions. For twenty years she taught drawing, painting and design at several colleges and universities. Ms. Lukitsch spent two years teaching in Turkey on a Fulbright grant. For several years she served as Curator and Director of Exhibitions at Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, VA. Ms. Lukitsch was painter in residence at Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, N.Y., The Hilai Center for the Arts in Ma’alot, Israel and The Virginia Center for Creative Arts in Amherst, VA. Her paintings are in numerous private and public collections including The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; The Museum of Contemporary Art (Accademia d’Arte Moderna, Dino Scalabrino), Montecatini, Italy; The State Museum of Sculpture and Painting, Ankara, Turkey; Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer and Feld, Washington, DC; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flum, Washington, DC; University Health Systems, San Antonio, TX; and the United States Embassy in Panama. Carol Lukitsch earned her MFA at The University of Maryland, College Park and a BFA summa cum laude at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.
