Ken Riley

Kenneth "Ken" Pauling Riley (born September 21, 1919 in Waverly , Missouri , † June 2015 in Santa Barbara , California ) was an American painter and illustrator .

Life

Riley's father had Irish ancestry, his mother had Dutch ancestry. He grew up in Kansas City , studied at the Kansas City Art Institute with Thomas Hart Benton and then from 1941 as a member of the Art Students League in New York City with Frank DuMond . He also attended evening classes at the Grand Central School of Art with Harvey Dunn in New York City .

He first made a living selling illustrations to various pulp magazines , including the Saturday Evening Post , National Geographic , Life and Reader's Digest . Then he joined the US armed forces during World War II , where he served with the US Coast Guard as a war painter with the rank of specialist . After the war, as a member of the Society of Illustrators, he painted landscapes of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park for the National Park Service . He also taught at Brigham Young University in Utah .

In the early 1970s he and his wife moved to Tucson , Arizona , where he had his own studio and mainly painted cowboy and Indian motifs. Riley was a founding member of the National Academy of Western Art, from 1982 until his retirement in 2002 a member of the Cowboy Artists of America (CAA) and belonged to the original seven-member artist group Tucson 7 . Works can be found in well-known collections such as the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis , the Smithsonian Institution , the White House , the Autry Museum of the American West , the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, and the West Point Museum of the US Air Force Academy .

Most recently he lived with his wife in Santa Barbara, California, where he died in 2015.

Awards

Riley was the first recipient of the Eiteljorg Museum Award for excellence in American art in 1993. He received the "Prix de West" at the 1995 National Cowboy Hall of Fame Show. He has received gold and silver medals and the Artists' Choice Awards from the Cowboy Artists of America Association.

literature

• Susan Hallsten McGarry: West of Camelot: The Historical Paintings of Kenneth Riley. Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western Art, 1993. ISBN 978-0-9635642-1-4
• Tisa Rodriguez Sherman: The Tucson 7 , Tucson Museum of Art , 1997. ISBN 978-0-911611-10-6 ( limited preview in Google Book Search)

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Kenneth Riley , The Greenwich Workshop.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Kenneth Riley ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Cowboy Artists of America.
3. ↑ A. Keith Brodkin: Tucson 7 Artists ( Memento of the original from September 12, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.