Evyind Earle

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Full Name:

Evyind Earle

Occupation / Title:

,

Date of birth:

26/04/1916

Date of death:

20/07/2000

Biography


Eyvind Earle has enjoyed a prolific career spanning 60 years. Eyvind Earle began painting at the age of 10 and the diligent young artist’s work matured so quickly his paintings were exhibited in France by the time he was 13. From the time of his first one-man show in France when he was just fourteen, the artist’s fame has steadily grown.

At the age of 21 Earle opened at Charles Morgan Galleries, his first of many one-man shows in New York. The response was so positive that the exhibition sold out and the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased one of his paintings for their permanent collection. In 1951 Eyvind Earle joined Walt Disney Studios and was responsible for the styling, background and color for Sleeping Beauty.

Family and early life


Earle’s father, Ferdinand, was a professional painter who studied with Adolphe William Bouguereau and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Ferdinand Earle groomed his son as an artist from childhood, undertaking the boy’s education with an old-school emphasis on practice making perfect. At the age of ten, Eyvind Earle’s parents divorced, and his father hauled him off from California, first taking him to Mexico City, then on junkets around Europe. Once abroad, Ferdinand set his son a choice: read 50 pages or paint a picture–daily.

Eyvind chose to paint, and the two would work together each day on the same subject. “He never explained anything,” Earle recalls. “I would always finish long before he did, so I would simply stand and watch him for hours.”  By the time the artist was 14, he was good enough to have a public showing in Ascain, a small town in the south of France. “I really had very little talent,” he admits, “but at the time, I was quite conceited. Everybody said ‘ooh’ and ‘ah,’ because no other kid had done hundreds of paintings.” 

In 1937, at the age of 21, Earle set out for New York on his bicycle, painting a watercolor on each of the 42 days it took him to cross the continent. Only a year later, the Charles Morgan Galleries held a show of the paintings to critical acclaim, and the gallery continued to show his work each year. In 1940, The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought one of his watercolors for its permanent collection. That painting, entitled Weatherbeaten, depicts a lone farmhouse and a stand of bare trees, with the spring snow beginning to thaw into patches of mud. The scene lacks the visionary quality of Earle’s mature work, but long fingers of shadow and one gaunt tree hint at his later landscapes.

Career outline


Earle has attained critical acclaim from such publications as Time, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New York World-Telegram, The Art News and The New York Sun.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rahr-West Art Museum, Phoenix Museum of Art and Arizona State University Art Museum have purchased Earle’s works for their permanent collections.

For the past 70 years Earle has also had many successful one-man exhibitions throughout the world.  As an illustrator, he has worked as production designer, color stylist and background painter for the Disney animated classics Sleeping Beauty, Paul Bunyan and Lady and the Tramp. American Artists Group has published over 600 of Earle’s designs and sold over 300,000,000 of his Christmas cards during the past 50 years.

Personal style


Earle’s command of beautiful, simplified shapes, dominant in each composition, is enhanced by the sensitivity with which he embroiders textual richness and elements of contrasting scale. His freedom of creative concept which carries both artist and viewer into gorgeous lands that never were, All are bathed in liquid-jewel color.

Influences


1.The French landscapist Pierre Henri de Valenciennes once wrote that the greatest artists are those who, “by closing their eyes, have seen Nature in her ideal form, clad in the riches of the imagination.” Earle captures the spirit of his subjects. 2.Ferdinand Eywind,his father.(because he let Earle to choose if he want to read 50 pages or paint a picture) 3.pre-renaissance and gothic art, artists such as Van Eyck, Bruegel and Albrecht Durer, and Persian and Japanese prints

Honors and awards


1953 Cannes Film Festival Award and an Oscar for Best Short Subject for “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom”  Annie Award: Winsor McCay Award 1998

Filmography


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