Carl Cecil Sublett

(1919-2008) lived in Knoxville
Sea Sands, 1967
oil on canvas, 40 x 40 ¼ inches, 80.57

Sublett attended Western Kentucky State College in Bowling Green, KY. He left college in 1941 to serve as a sergeant in the U.S. Army. While in Italy, during the war some of his camp sketches were printed in the division newspaper.  When the war ended Sublett entered the University Study Center in Florence, Italy and received the Citizens Award for his artwork. In 1954 he moved his family of four to Knoxville, TN where he enrolled in painting classes at the University of Tennessee with Professor C. Kermit Ewing.

He became a founding member of the art group, The Knoxville Seven. This progressive group worked from 1955-1965 producing some of the first abstract expressionist art in Tennessee during that time. Sublett won numerous awards for his paintings. In 1966 he became a full time Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Ten years later he was promoted to full professor. For the next few years he continued to teach and exhibit nationally as well as internationally. In 1982 he retired from teaching and opened the Sublett Gallery in Knoxville, TN in 1984. In 1991 The Unseen Carl Sublett was the first exhibit at the new Knoxville Museum of Art that was built on the site of the 1982 World’s Fair. In 1994 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Knoxville Arts Council.

Sea Sands was on view in the Tennessee Painting Today 1967 exhibition at the Tennessee State Museum. This exhibition represented as accurately as possible the variety and highest achievements of contemporary paintings in Tennessee at that time.