Clark Hulings
Clark Hulings was and is a seminal American painter. This is the starting place for his life and work.
The Artist and His Legacy
Hulings' work defines a modernist sensibility without departing from the real—without removing all that is recognizable or deluding the audience by escaping into the wholly abstract.
The Modern Realist
Hulings undermined the distraction of class, reminding us that most people don’t move between glamorous towers or drag their knuckles. He showcased the dignity, nobility, and beauty of common people and ordinary things.
One of the Great Discoverers
Hulings insisted the contemporary world could only be fully understood by specific, personal awareness of its inhabitants. Therefore, he was relentlessly devoted to the figure and figurative work. He pursued stunning multinational backdrops replete with the day-to-day realities only visible through the lens of an international nomad.
Challenging an Audience & Status Quo
A relentless experimenter, Hulings exploited modern techniques from the conventions of impressionism and abstract art, bending them with equal ease into the service of an open-ended art of the figure that wouldn’t limit itself to conventional realist boundaries. His compositional "recipes" enabled him to play the sly subversive, literally slipping things under our noses that we might otherwise be too closed to notice.
Advancing the Craft and its Meaning
Clark Hulings assailed our bias toward the “other” by engaging culture through visceral daily reality. An enemy of distraction, he reprimanded modernism’s flight from that challenge and into the purely abstract. He instead produced a continuous documentary of a changing world at the pace of its most common inhabitants.
Freshly Revealed
New Hulings discoveries every week!
Hulings 100
You only turn 100 once! A celebration of Hulings’ Centennial anniversary kicks off in Santa Fe, New Mexico November 20, 2022 with a big party at La Fonda on the Plaza Historic Hotel, and you’re invited. Get ready to be greeted the way Clark would have wanted, with a friendly burro and a signature martini. …
Auction Alert: Sicilian Light in Giuliana
30 miles south of Palermo, Sicily, there’s a small town with the motto Urbs Opulentissima—the richest city. Founded in 1185, Giuliana’s richness is probably more in its hilltop views, its proximity to two nature preserves, and its 16th century church, Santuario of Maria SS. dell’Udienza, with an alabaster statue of the Madonna. Thinking About Light …
SOLD: Annecy Market
“It’s the intricacy of the top half of the painting that makes this work such a success: the patina on the buildings accented by periodic window boxes, lanterns…and yes, French flag-colored laundry.” A Flowered City The Old Town of Annecy, France still has cobblestone streets: the market is open on Tuesdays—when it’s mostly food and …
SOLD: Taormina Cobblestones
“The star in this city scene is clearly the street itself: giving these four a way to get where they’re going, presenting an intriguing downhill slope that makes their destination a shadowed mystery.” Clark Hulings, as you know if you’ve been reading our series, was traveling through Europe and North Africa in 1960, solidifying his …
SOLD: House In Sicily
“House in Sicily has esteemed family provenance: it comes from the collection of Jennie Ottinger, passed to her by her grandmother—Clark Hulings’ sister—Sue Ottinger.” Picture it: Sicily, 1960. As Andy Warhol is still a couple of years away from the debut of his Campbell’s Soup Cans, Clark Hulings is traveling in the real world, …
SOLD: Cornwall, English Farmhouse
Cornwall, English Farmhouse oil on canvas, 21 x 32″ Sold through The Scottsdale Art Auction April 8-9, 2022.
SOLD: Patience
Patience oil on canvas, 12 x 18″ price available on request Sold through The Scottsdale Art Auction April 8-9, 2022.
Hulings in Western Art Collector
“The Artist of the American West creates an illusion in order to sustain it. Clark Hulings creates an illusion in order to subvert it.” —James D. Balestrieri A mule train works its way up a steep canyon trail, deep in snow. In the depths of a Montana winter, powerful draft horses pull a wagon …
Hulings’ Legacy, 99 Years Later…
This weekend, we celebrated Clark Hulings’ 99th Birthday. (And stay tuned, because we have big plans for the upcoming 100th!) Hulings’ artistic and entrepreneurial legacies are more relevant than ever. His work invites us into the flow of time. Hardworking human beings from around the world are surrounded by the dynamic and changing contexts of …
Clark Hulings—Working Artist
“Clark Hulings saw himself as a working artist whose subject was work. The work of people whose lives are their work, whose rhythms are the rhythms of the seasons, whose inner lives remain a complex mystery.” James D. Balestrieri, author of the upcoming Clark Hulings book, takes us inside the world of Hulings’ work …
Dean Mitchell—Realism & Beyond
“I love exploring the common man. I like things that have a sense of struggle about them, a sense of survival about them.”—Dean Mitchell With thanks to our co-producer Shirley Holland, we were honored to welcome acclaimed painter and Clark Hulings Foundation Advisory Board member Dean Mitchell to a recent Evenings with Hulings Virtual …
Clark Hulings: Quantum Realist
“Even when Hulings’ villages, markets and mission bustle with activity, they depict cultures so old that they blur the edges between culture and nature. His paintings are mosaics—and also stained glass—but imagine mosaics cracked by time, with vines and weeds growing up through them, nature entwining culture, portrait entangled with landscape, held suspended in a …
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