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May Issue 2009
if ART Gallery
in Columbia, SC, Features Works by Carl Blair
if ART Gallery in Columbia, SC, is presenting the exhibit, Carl Blair's Flora & Fauna, featuring wooden animal sculptures and new paintings by this Greenville, NC, artist, on view through May 9, 2009. This will be the first Columbia exhibition by the veteran artist featuring sculpture.
The exhibit title refers to the plant and animal life of Blair's mind, some of it of literal places and critters, other simply of his imagination. Nature always has been Blair's main visual inspiration nature and the countryside in general. Some of his animal sculptures are representative, and all of them, fanciful. They are a reminder of Blair's upbringing on a farm in Kansas and of his insistence that as a youngster, he spent more time with animals than with human beings. To some extent, Blair regards his animal sculptures as self-portraits.
Nature typically is the basis of his heavily abstracted paintings, whether it's the flatlands of the Midwest or the more mountainous terrain of the South Carolina Upstate. There, Blair lives on Paris Mountain, just outside of Greenville and near Paris Mountain State Park. He has lived there since the 1970s, when the place was still mostly undeveloped.
In 2005, Blair received South Carolina's Elizabeth O'Neill Verner Governor's Award for the Arts for Lifetime Achievement. He has been as an artist, administrator, educator and a driving force in South Carolina arts since 1957, when he began teaching at Bob Jones University, from which he retired in 1998. He has shown in galleries and museums all along the East Coast as well as abroad. His prominence as a painter and sculptor has increased steadily and has been marked by several museum retrospectives since 1995. In 1999, he was included in 100 Years/100 Artists: Views of the 20th Century in South Carolina Arts, the South Carolina State Museum's look back at the 20th century.
For further information
check our SC Commercial Gallery listings, call the gallery at
803/238-2351 or visit (http://ifartgallery.blogspot.com).
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