Duane Bryers

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Duane B. "Dick" Bryers (born July 2, 1911 in Luce County , Michigan , † May 30, 2012 in Tucson , Arizona ) was an American painter and illustrator .

Duane Bryers (signature) .png

Life

Duane Bryers was the son of Samuel Edward Bryers (1877-1965) and his wife Winifred "Winnie" Dawn Bryers, née Myers (1883-1956). He had three brothers and two sisters. He spent his childhood on his parents' farm on the upper peninsula of Michigan. When he was twelve, the family moved to Virginia , Minnesota , where he lived until 1939. He then had studios in Chicago and New York City .

After the Second World War he married Phyllis D. McFarland, with whom he had a son and two daughters. From 1959 he lived on a ranch near Tucson, Arizona. In 1964 he was divorced. He met his second wife Denise "Dee" Ray (born November 3, 1924, † January 29, 2002) know and lived with her in the early 1970s in a Mexican village, 90 miles from Mexico City . In 1975 they left Mexico. They bought a piece of land in Sonoita and built a house on it in 1980, which Bryers called "The Mud Hut".

Dee died in 2002 and Duane Bryers returned to Tucson. He died a few weeks before his 101st birthday.

Act

In 1937, Bryers won a cash prize for the first time with a mural on Minnesota mining history.

In 1942 he took part in the National War Poster Competition of the New York Museum of Modern Art in category C "The Nature of the Enemy" with his poster design This is the Enemy . The poster was featured in an article in Life magazine. During his time at the flight mechanics school of the US Army Air Forces from 1943 to 1946, he also earned some money with so-called "girlie art" on aircraft fuselages ( nose art ). For the military base newspaper he drew posters and comic strips with the character Cokey he had invented .

After his military service, Bryers mainly illustrated calendars with the theme "The American West" published by Brown & Bigelow in Saint Paul , Minnesota. In 1974 he also illustrated the book The Bunkhouse Boys from the Lazy Daisy Ranch , the text of which his second wife Dee wrote. However, he became famous for his creation Hilda , a fun - loving, chubby pin-up girl, of whom he had made around 250 drawings, starting in 1956. Hilda also appeared on Brown & Bigelow calendars. The figure gained fame well into the 1980s and was rediscovered a year after Bryer's death. In addition to the real existing pin-up icon Betty Page , Hilda was the most frequently depicted pin-up girl in the 1950s.

Bryers was a member of the seven-person artist group Tucson 7 . He was named Artist of the Year at the Tucson Art Festival in 1987. He also exhibited at the Prix de West at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City , which has some of his paintings in their collection. There he was awarded the Trustees Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Western Art in 1980 at a solo exhibition. He also took part in annual exhibitions in Houston , the so-called Western Heritage Show. The Duane Bryers Studio (DBS) has been located in the Tucson Museum of Art since November 2013.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Denise Bryers (1924-2002) , SSDI .
  2. ^ Interesting Times with Low Waters - Duane Bryers , Tucson News Now, 2001.
  3. ↑ a b Kimberly Matas: Artist Duane Bryers' life, in broad strokes , Arizona Daily Star, June 1, 2012.
  4. ^ President Roosevelt congratulates 2,200 artists of the country ... , Weißes Haus / The Museum of Modern Art, November 16, 1942, p. 4.
  5. ↑ Dee Ray, Duane Bryers (Ill.): The Bunkhouse Boys from the Lazy Daisy Ranch , Northland Press, 1974. ISBN 978-0-873-58128-8 ( limited preview in Google book search)
  6. ↑ Marie Southyard Ospina: Hilda Is The Lost Pinup Girl Of The 1950s - So Here Is Why Duane Bryers' Leading Lady Was So Special , Bustle, January 28, 2015.
  7. ^ Margot Peppers: How Hilda the forgotten Fifties plus-size pin-up was rediscovered one year after the man who created her died , Mail Online , August 6, 2013.
  8. ↑ "Hilda," the plus-size pin-up , Rock 'n' Road, August 19, 2013.
  9. ↑ Christine C. Brindza: One of the Bunkhouse Boys: Duane Bryers and His Studio , Resource Library / Tucson Museum of Art, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Bryers, Duane
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bryers, Duane B .; Bryers, Dick (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter and illustrator
DATE OF BIRTH July 2, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Luce County , Michigan , USA
DATE OF DEATH May 30, 2012
Place of death Tucson , USA