Clarence Holbrook Carter (American Artist)

Clarence Holbrook Carter was born in Portsmouth, Ohio. He studied at the Cleveland School of Art from 1923 to 1927. He then studied with Hans Hofmann in Capri, Italy in the summer of 1927. Throughout the 1930s and 40s he was known for his realist painting of rural America and the burden brought on Americans by the Great Depression. By the end of the Second World War, he had adopted a more surrealist approach to painting. Accomplishments in the field of advertising design encouraged experimentation and abstraction in his work. During the 1950s and 1960s, his work took on an increasingly surrealistic style with monsters and imaginary animals stalking fanciful landscapes. He had a series of paintings of oversized animals leering at the viewer over a large wall. In later years he depicted floating, transparent ovoid shapes transposed onto architectural landscapes, representing the Carter’s conception of the human spirit striving for perfection.

Ch'iu Ying (Chinese Painter)

From a humble background, born to a peasant family, Ch’iu Ying (1494-1552) is said to have started as a lacquer artisan. He later excelled at painting landscapes and figures. In his early years, he studied under Chou Chin (ca. 1460-1535), but later he met T’an Yin and Wen Cheng-ming of Soochow. He also turned to the essence of T'ang and Sung masters to create a style of his own. During his career, he was invited by famous collectors to paint at their residences, where Ch'iu had the opportunity to copy the works in their collections and learn more about ancient styles. With his fine and beautiful style, Ch'iu Ying was known as one of the Four Masters of the Ming. His fine-style figure paintings follow the T'ang and Sung models in a beautifully delicate. Even during his lifetime, Ch'iu Ying was praised and his influence spread to literati, folk, and court painting of the Ming and Ch'ing, serving as testimony to his reputation as a painter of unsurpassed skill.
Specializing in the gongbi brush technique, he painted in ink washes and used the green-and-blue style. He painted with the support of wealthy patrons, creating images of flowers, gardens, religious subjects, and landscapes in the fashions of the Ming Dynasty.

Maurice de Vlaminck

Born in France in 1876, Maurice de Vlaminck learned to play the violin at a young age and studied painting in his late teens. Along with music and painting, he was a writer of poetry and mildly pornographic novels in 1902 and 1903. Between the years 1904 and 1908 he was considered one of the key artists in the Fauve movement of modern artists who had a similar avant-garde use of intense color. Ignoring details he used landscapes to merely express mood through the use of violent color and brushwork. He began experimenting with “deconstruction,” moving from lack of detail to dabs and streaks of color that convey a sense of motion. His later work displayed a dark palette, punctuated by heavy strokes of contrasting white paint. He died in 1958.

Marcel Vertes (impressionist)

Marcel Vertes was a Hungarian painter, printmaker, illustrator, and costume designer who was born in 1895. He studied art in Paris and followed in the footsteps of the great French impressionists. At his prime in the 1920’s, he perfectly captured the spirit and culture of the wild and vibrant decade through his lithographs and paintings. He later had to flee to the United States during the Second World War. Living in New York City as an already established artist, he continued his work and made great strides in book illustration. He won two academy awards (best art direction and best costume design) for his work in the original 1952 film, Moulin Rouge at the end of his career.

Earnest Patton (folk artist)

Earnest Patton is a wood carver from Kentucky. This weathered, bearded, rugged mountain man was cousin to folk artist sculptor Edgar Tolson. Earnest and his wife in the 1970s made frequent visits to Edgar’s home which is where he learned the essentials of wood carving. Though his style and content are similar to Edgar, his figures are twice the size and hold a different feeling, emphasizing different aspects of the structures.

Earl Gray (folk artist)

In 1990, Earl took a house-painting job for a woman named Kate McComas. Kate says he was an extremely hard worker. On a rare lunch break, Earl carved Kate a back-scratcher. She was taken by the craftsmanship of the piece and asked to see more. Earl brought her a shoe box full of small pieces and it was then evident that he had been carving for some time. Kate happened to be a docent at the Huntington Museum of Art. She showed the carvings to head curator Eason Eige and he immediately wanted to buy Earl’s work. Eason began promoting, and Earl began to get noticed on a much wider scale. Earl took his art to the next level, into carving stone. He regularly carved faces in his sculptures. Learning through trial and error he developed his own style using the tools and material of his choice. His vision, however, would not have been acknowledged without the help of Eason Eige. Six years later, Earl carved a structure of Eason and his dog Lillie Mae which the museum now holds.