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.Michael Tomor, Contemporary Romanticism: Landscapes in Pastel Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art exhibition catalog, 1999 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.Sources for Lukits' Plein-Air pastels include Suzanne Bellah's The Plein-Air Pastels of Theodore Lukits (1991) and Jeffrey Morseburg's Theodore Lukits, The Jonathan Club Collection (2010). 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.
Early life 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.Jeffrey Morseburg, Arny Karl, biographical essay, Arny Karl.Org
Commercial art career 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.See Clear Channel web site 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.Jeffrey Morseburg, Arny Karl, Ask Art Artist Summary Biographies 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.
Personal life Arny Karl was married to the teacher Lee Kietz on June 7, 1969. The couple lived in Rancho Cucamonga, beneath the San Bernardino Mountains that Karl often painted. The Karls had no children and were divorced April 15, 1982. Later, Karl had a long relationship with a woman that he referred to as his wife, Katherine "Kay" Karl, who survived him, but there does not seem to be a record of a formal marriage and there were no children from their relationship. He had a strong, masculine appearance and he was eccentric and colorful in appearance and actions. Karl usually wore paint-splattered clothing and has been described as "looking like he just emerged from the studio", which most often was the case. He could be secretive about his art work, seldom sharing his paintings with anyone except his closest artist friends, who he felt would understand them. In his later years, he was wary of outsiders and reclusive enough that few visitors ever were allowed access to his home. In spite of a generally retiring nature, he developed close friendships with a number of his co-workers in the billboard industry and several of his fellow art students. In his later years, Karl worked in a drafty studio with a complement of cats that was adjacent to his ramshackle home. He was reluctant to see doctors and this quirk contributed to his health issues. He died in a hospital in Ontario, in San Bernardino County, California, after a lengthy illness.California Death Index, Social Security Administration.
Artistic education After an introduction from the billboard painter Bernardo "Barney" Sepulveda, Arny Karl entered the Hancock Park atelier of Theodore Lukits (1897–1992), the Lukits Academy, in 1968. At that time painters like R. H. Ives Gammell (1893–1981) in Boston and Lukits in Los Angeles were two of the few fine arts teachers whose instruction was based on the ideals and techniques of the 19th century French École des Beaux-Arts.Peter Seitz Adams describes Lukits studio practices in the exhibition catalog for The Pastels of Theodore Lukits (1991) This type of instruction is now known as the "Atelier Method." The Beaux-Arts method had evolved over hundreds of years from the Renaissance through the 19th century and was brought to perhaps its highest level of refinement by Parisian masters like William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Leon Bonnat (1833–1922).
Lukits, who had been teaching since 1924, was a respected California portrait, landscape and still life painter whose work was popular with the film community. He was an award-winning graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago where he had studied with a host of Parisian- and European-trained painters including Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939), Edmund H. Wuerpel (1866–1947), Edwin Blashfield (1848–1936), Karl Albert Buehr (1866–1952), Wellington J. Reynolds (1865–1949), Richard E. Miller (1875–1943), Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872–1930) and Robert Henri (1865–1929).Lukits own training is covered in Theodore Lukits:An American Orientalist (1998) as well as on the Theodore Lukits.Org web site Lukits passed on the accumulated knowledge he learned in his years at the Washington University School of Fine Arts, Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago to his students, who began by "drawing from the antique" which meant doing charcoal or graphite portraits of marbles and plaster casts of ancient Roman and Greek statuary. These studies taught the students to understand "values" which are the tonal gradations of light and shadow, applicable to working under artificial lighting conditions in the studio or out of doors under the natural light of the sun or moon. Advancement in a traditional atelier is based on mastery rather than an artificial quarter or semester system, so Karl moved from working from plaster casts to simple still life set-ups only after his instructor was satisfied with his work.These are standard French atelier practices as elevation was based on mastering a technique not in time spent, thus a talented student could advance rapidly. Eventually he began to work in color, painting still life set-ups under the colored lights that Lukits used to simulate conditions an artist would find out of doors.Peter Adams discusses Lukits more unusual studio practices in his essay in Pastels of Theodore Lukits Carnegie Art Museum exhibition catalog in his essay "Recollections" p.4-5 (1991). The colored lights may have originated with his teacher Carl Werntz in Chicago. As the years passed under Lukits' guidance, Karl also began attending Lukits' anatomy and life drawing classes. Karl studied with Lukits for an entire decade while he supported himself in the field of commercial art and he concluded his studies in 1978.See Jeffrey Morseburg's essays on Arny Karl.Org Web Site
Plein-Air painting career From the time he was young, Arny Karl had always loved the outdoors and when he entered the atelier of Theodore Lukits, it was the elderly painter's large collection of Plein-Air Pastels that made the deepest impression on him. While Lukits was no longer working out of doors, he explained the techniques he used in his works of the 1920s to Karl and simulated conditions of natural light in his studio for his students.There are numerous sources for Lukits' Plein-Air career, see Suzanne Bellah's The Plein-Air Pastels of Theodore Lukits (1991) and Jeffrey Morseburg's Theodore Lukits, The Jonathan Club Collection (2010). By the late 1960s, Karl was working out of doors, painted in the foothills of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains. He brought his works back to the Lukits atelier for the older artist to critique and his steadily work advanced and improved. By the mid-1970s, Peter Seitz Adams (b. 1950) and Tim Solliday (b. 1952), two younger painters who were interested in working out of doors, had entered the Lukits atelier. Karl, who had already been working out of doors for a number of years, served as their early mentor, helping them learn the techniques of working directly from nature. Together the three painters worked painting the stands of Eucalyptus along the Southern California Coast, working in places like St. Malo Beach, where the Adams family had their beach house, the wetlands at Batiquitos Lagoon and Laguna Beach. Karl, Solliday and Adams also made longer sketching trips to the High Sierras, Utah, Yellowstone National Park and the Canadian Rockies. These three painters worked almost exclusively in pastel and dedicated themselves to championing that medium as a method ideally suited to capturing the rapidly changing natural conditions that an artist encountered out of doors. Karl also painted in Europe the entire year of 1971, working in the Alps, Germany, Italy and Greece. He usually worked in small sizes when he painted from nature, from to and then worked up larger paintings in pastel or oil in his studio.See Jeffrey Morseburg, Arny Karl: A Critical Assessment found on Ask Art web site and Arny Kar.Org Karl held his Plein-Air pastel works closely, seldom exhibiting them or showing them to anyone except his fellow artists, a practice he learned from his teacher and mentor, Theodore Lukits.See Jeffrey Morseburg, Arny Karl, A Critical Analysis, Ask Art Web Site, Artist's Summary. He saw the pastel work as his reference material for larger, more ambitious works and they served as a form of visual memory, so he seldom wanted to let go of them. In large part because of Karl's influence, by the late 1970s, a number of painters were working out of doors in the Plein-Air Pastel tradition that artists like Theodore Lukits and William Louis Otte (1871–1957) had established in the 1920s.
Professional career