Clark Hulings

Clark Hulings
Clark Hulings at his New York opening
Born	(1922-11-21)November 21, 1922 Florida
Died	February 2, 2011(2011-02-02) (aged 88) Santa Fe, New Mexico
Nationality	American
Education	Sigismund Ivanowsky George Bridgman Art Students League of New York
Known for	Painting
Movement	Realism
Awards	The Council of American Artists’ award The Allied Artists of America gold medal Prix de West Cowboy Hall of Fame trustees' Gold Medal

Clark Hulings (November 20, 1922 – February 2, 2011) was an American realist painter. He was born in Florida and raised in New Jersey. Clark also lived in Spain, New York, Louisiana, and throughout Europe before settling in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the early 1970s. The travels did much to influence his keen eye for people in the state of accomplishing daily tasks.

His training as an artist began as a teenager with Sigismund Ivanowsky and George Bridgman, and concluded at the Art Students League of New York with Frank Reilly. Clark came back to the League to give a lecture in 2007.

After early careers in portraiture and illustration, he devoted himself to easel painting. A modern genre painter, he is best known for his elaborate European and Mexican market and street scenes, his still lifes of roses and his depictions of donkeys. For the past forty years Hulings’ art has been eagerly sought after by collectors, museums and corporations.

Clark Hulings was born in 1922 in Florida, where his father, Courtland Marcus Hulings, was the manager of a plant which produced a gas for fumigating orange trees. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was an infant, and he and his sister, Susan, were sent to live with their maternal grandparents in Potsdam, New York, for the next three years, while his father worked in Valencia, Spain. In Valencia, Hulings’ father, while representing American Cyanamid, courted and married Elena Harker, the 21-year-old daughter of Herbert Edward Harker, the British Consul in Valencia, and his wife, Julia Howard Harker. Courtland Hulings and Elena Harker were married in London, England, in 1925. The two children joined them abroad.

In 1928, the Hulings family returned to the United States, settling in Westfield, New Jersey, where Clark's younger sister, Elena, was born. At the age of twelve, his father arranged art lessons with Sigismund Ivanowski, a portrait and landscape painter who had served as Court Painter to Tsar Nicholas II. In his 1986 book "A Gallery of Paintings," Hulings credits his father with conveying to him his "great love of paintings." By the time Hulings graduated from school in 1940, the tuberculosis which had killed his mother left him in fragile health. He was unable to enter college. However, he did continue a limited schedule with Ivanowski, as well as with George Bridgman, the celebrated drawing teacher, at the Art Students League of New York.