Arny Karl

Arny Karl (birth name: Arnold Helmut Karl) (July 31, 1940 - February 15, 2000) was one of the key artists in the early stages of the California Plein-Air Revival, which started in the 1980s and continues to this day. Along with Tim Solliday (b. 1952) and Peter Seitz Adams (b. 1950), Karl helped revitalize the use of pastels to paint outdoors or en plein air, as the French described regarding the practice of working directly from nature. Karl was a student of Theodore Lukits (1897–1992), who was a prominent California Impressionist and the best known Early California painter to have worked in pastel. His work has been included in a number of museum exhibitions, is represented in a number of prominent public and private collections and has been the subject of a number of curatorial essays.

Karl was born in South Tyrol, Italy to an Austrian father, Anton Karl (1899–1984) and an Italian mother, Rosa Maria Adami (1911–1966). His father was a minister and a writer, but it was his mother who encouraged Karl's artistic development through her own interest in design and the arts. The Karl family moved frequently, first to Milan, then to Rome and finally to Florence, where Karl grew up and, as a student, was fascinated and awed by the art of the Renaissance. Karl enjoyed the Italian countryside and was always drawn to nature as a subject. In 1961, he emigrated to the United States and settled in San Gabriel Valley, just east of Los Angeles, where his sister was living after her immigration into the United States. Initially, like many new immigrants, Karl worked at a variety of different jobs but because of his artistic talent, Karl enrolled at Pasadena City College to study commercial sign and scenic painting, which he felt would enable him to pursue a practical career that would still involve art.

To earn a living, Karl found employment in the outdoor advertising industry. In the 1960s, Los Angeles, with its tremendous urban sprawl, had a large billboard industry and large, colorful billboards towered over the streets and freeways. In that era most of the boards were still hand painted and were essentially large murals that were painted in vast studios, or on site, by artists on scaffolds. Initially, Karl was hired as a 'helper' or apprentice at Foster & Kleiser, a large Los Angeles outdoor advertising firm that is now part of Clear Channel Outdoor. He mixed paints and assisted the more experienced artists, while he learned the technique of completing vast paintings under a strict deadline. Karl quickly climbed up the union ladder and was soon painting his own large billboards for Foster & Kleiser and then for Pacific Outdoor Advertising. Like many commercial artists, he found the lack of creativity in commercial art frustrating and wanted a career as a fine artist, but realized he would need further training. Fortuitously, Bernardo "Barney" Sepulveda, a senior co-worker at Foster & Kleiser, introduced Karl to the iconoclastic figurative painter and Early California pastelist Theodore Lukits. Known as a staunch traditionalist, Lukits' own work and teaching career helped preserve the ideals and methods of the late-19th-century French ateliers and academies. Karl immediately recognized and respected Lukits' knowledge and mastery of pastel and oil landscapes, formal portraits, still lifes, and anatomical drawing and knew he had found a teacher and mentor.

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