Ray Harm ( born Ray Harm ; November 9, 1926 - April 9, 2015 ) is an American artist known for his paintings depicting wild animals, especially birds . He also contributed to the technology of selling works of art.
| Ray Harm | |
|---|---|
| Ray harm | |
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| Date of Birth | November 9, 1926 |
| Place of Birth | Randolph County, West Virginia |
| Date of death | April 9, 2015 (88 years old) |
| Place of death | Sonoita, Arizona |
| Citizenship |  USA |
| Genre | painting |
Biography
Ray Ayuvil was born in Randolph County, West Virginia , where his father was a concert violinist , forester and amateur herbalist. When Ray's parents divorced and his mother married William Harm, the boy received the surname of his stepfather. Subsequently, Ray Harm left West Virginia as a teenager and became a cowboy in the western states.
During the Second World War he served in the US Navy , which allowed him to take advantage of the benefits of the law on demobilized military personnel to continue his education. Harm entered an art school and later became an artist. Selling his paintings, Harm simultaneously worked at a construction site and trained circus horses to earn a living.
In 1961, the artistβs work attracted the attention of Wood Hannah, a businessman and art collector from Louisville (Kentucky). Together they came up with high-quality copies of Harm's paintings, which will be released in a limited edition. The idea was a great success and gave birth to a new marketing approach to art, which later brought financial success to thousands of artists.
In 1963, Harm received a full-time artist job at the University of Kentucky . He later led a weekly column in the Louisville Times and was a popular lecturer. He was also a frequent guest on the radio.
In the last years of his life, Harm severely criticized artists who used photographs for their paintings, projecting images onto a canvas and then drawing a picture. In the future, this became the usual method in the production of limited edition copies. Harm himself proudly declared that for his copies he used his own sketches from nature and only used models from natural history museums to clarify details.
In the late 1990s, Harm stopped selling copies of his work, making a total of 195 issues. After that, he only occasionally performed separate work in order to raise funds for various organizations. With his wife Katie, he left Kentucky and settled on a ranch in Arizona . His son, Ray Harm Jr. (better known as Hap), lives in Kentucky and sells copies of his father's original works that were not part of his main collection.
Harm's archive, including engravings, newspaper clippings, marginal notes, black-and-white photographs, exhibition catalogs, gallery announcements and 53 documents from his personal correspondence, is kept at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville. Harm died in Sonoit, Arizona on April 9, 2015. [1]
Ranks and Distinctions
- Harm was one of the 10 most famous artists of Decor Magazine.
- According to Kentucky, Harm was the "man of the year" in 1964.
- in 1962, Ray Harm painted a family of bald eagles for President John F. Kennedy .