"Facing the Challenge" Acrylic on canvas Signed lower right: Carol Theroux, titled on an artist's label affixed to the frame verso, inscribed verso: Blood Blackfoot (Old Timer 1870-75) 30" H x 15" W Provenance: Estate of the artist Notes: Carol Theroux was an internationally recognized artist working traditional soft pastel, acrylics, oils, watercolor and charcoal figurative painting. She spent many years studying, taking lessons and also teaching landscape and still life painting before finally trying her skill in painting the human form. The colors are bright and alive in her finished paintings and are so seamless and smooth that it is hard to realize that it is done in the pastel medium. Carol was a charter member of the Pastel Society of America, among numerous national artistic societies. Theroux's subjects varied, sometimes in humorous characters of the old west or the "honky-tonk" girls in their dance hall costume. Yet Carol, of Cherokee and German descent, is most known for her intimate, emotionally-charged depiction of Native American children and young adults. Carol's comments on her art: "I wanted to make the Indian West digestible to the Anglo West and what better way than with an innocent child, all giving. I want all Americans to see and love Indian culture and to recognize the universality of all human experience… Indian people honor their old people for their wisdom, their veterans for their service, their babies for their beauty, and their young girls for their arrival into womanhood. It's a respectful society…. The only way to gain an understanding of Indian culture is to live it. I attend pow-wows for research, and I receive acceptance because I give. The Indians know that. The details in my work show my sincerity to them." Over more than 50 years of travel, Carol Theroux Studio collected many beautiful Indian artifacts from all over the country, used to ensure authenticity and to create that impression of drama within each painting.