The creative process makes the difference between living and dying, a fact that artist Lexi Sundell experienced in her own life and sees in the lives of others. An internationally known artist, she teaches workshops to foster the creative process, often through painting in acrylics. Creative consciousness was the subject of her 2014 TedX Whitefish talk. She was mostly known for her floral paintings until an unusual dream about a dangerous black panther in her kitchen provoked a sharp left turn in her painting. As a result, her current body of work features animals and birds as totems for the human spirit. A respected expert in acrylics, she applies multiple layers of paint and texture, often on large canvases, to achieve her distinctively rich colors in paint.
Her paintings have taken awards in juried competitions such as the first international Blossom—The Art of the Flower exhibition and the Avant Garden show at the Torpedo Art Factory. Her work appears in collections throughout the world and has been shown in museums such as the C. M. Russell Museum, Yellowstone Art Museum, the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, and others.
She has written two books on the subject of acrylics. Painting Acrylic Flowers A-Z was published by North Light in the USA, Search Press in the UK, Simon and Schuster in Australia, and later translated and published in French, Dutch, German, Italian, and Korean. Her most recent book, Creating Exceptional Color in Acrylics, was released by Barron’s in the USA and Search Press in the UK in 2012 and is also available in German, French, Italian, and Dutch. She also has an online training, Luminous Flowers in Acrylic, on the craftsy.com site.
A native Texan educated at Michigan State University and the University of Toronto, she first studied art history. Then she worked as a potter and later became one of the top six precision wax-carving specialists in North America in jewelry design.