E.
[Edward] Thor Carlson was born in Gardner, Massachusetts on
September 18, 1925.
He has drawn since childhood and began to paint in oils at the
age of ten. His first
murals were painted in 1942-43 for the Gardner High School auditorium.
Upon
graduation, he received a scholarship to attend the Art School
of the Worcester Art
Museum. He studied with Herbert Barnett and Leon Hovesepian.
His studies
were interrupted by WWII and a hitch in the Navy as a Sea Bee
in the South
Pacific.
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Portrait
of the Artist
by Barbara Ellis |
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While
overseas, he took his entrance exams for Yale's School of Fine
Arts. He
began there in 1946. He studied with Eugene Savage, Louis York,
Dean Keller,
and Sante Graziani. Before graduation, he was awarded a
Fulbright Fellowship
for a year's study at the Academia in Florence to study
fresco painting. Returning
to Yale, he completed his fifth and final year, studying
with Josef Albers and
Willem DeKooning. He graduated 'In Primi Honoris' with
a BFA in painting (1951).
After
graduation he went to New York City, working first as a Junior
Art Director
at the advertising firm of McCann-Erickson and, later,
on advise from well known
muralist, Allyn Cox, as a free-lance mural painter. He
became a member of the
National Society of Mural Painters (1956) after painting
a mural in the Waldorf-Astoria for Conrad N. Hilton.
He
left New York in 1957, returning to Massachusetts to teach art,
in addition to
producing it. In over twenty-seven years of teaching,
he has taught at the
Worcester and Fitchburg Art Museums and was Senior
Art Supervisor of the Athol
Public Schools. He founded the Art Departments of the
Mt. Wachusett and Massasoit
Community Colleges. He was an Artist in Residence at
the Applewild School,
Fitchburg. His last full time position was as the Instructor
for the Commercial Art
Program at Monty Tech., Fitchburg. He retired in 1983.
In
1986, he moved to Charlestown, New Hampshire. During the summer
of 1987,
he was a "Visiting Artist" at Saint Gaudens
National Park in Cornish.
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The Artist on the pergola
at
Saint Gaudens |
He
worked in pastel, directly from natural views, and produced
twenty-two large works. The
State of New Hampshire has purchased five of these
pastels through the "% for
Art Program", for display in several new courthouses.
Several years ago, he
relocated his studio to Newport, New Hampshire. In
1997, he was the Lead-Artist
for the Mural Project, a part of Newport's "Art Builds Community" commitment.
These celebrate the town's history and involved local
citizens, from age eight to
eighty, who painted a series of large paintings around
town.
Tapestry
weaving has occupied much of the artist's work during the past
thirty-
four years. His grandmother taught him Scandinavian
methods for tapestry. Many
of his tapestries have won prizes. His tapestry, "Peaceweaver's
Web", on exhibit
at the Entler Hotel Gallery, Shepherdstown, West Virginia,
was viewed by
President Bill Clinton during the Israeli-Syrian Peace
Conference in January 2000.
President Bill Clinton with the
Artist in front of The Peaceweaver's Web tapestry
The
artist's nineteen most recent illustrations of 2003-2004 are
from "Dante's
Inferno". They are drawn in pastel, on
paper, in sgrafitto, and as acrylic paintings.
These were exhibited at the Hammond Gallery at Fitchburg
State College in 2004
and at Worcester's Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel
in 2005.
Young struggling artists often have the problem
of selling their art because it is such a part of themselves. This
is a problem all artists have if they are sincere. Albert Ryder
hated to have his work go to others and often took them back and
worked on them some more. It's like having kids, at some point
you have to let them go, and if you do they will come back and
bless you.
-E.
Thor Carlson
He
has shown his work in major exhibits at the Worcester and Fitchburg
Museums,
at the gallery of the State Street Bank in Boston;
also, Saint Peter's Lutheran Church
on Madison Avenue, New York City, and in Dublin, at
Sandymont. President Aemon
DeValera purchased one of his works for the Vice Royal
Gallery.
His
works are in many public and private collections both in the
U.S.A. and in
Europe and North Africa. In addition to painting and
drawing, he has done stone
and wood sculpture. Saint Michael's College in Winooski,
Vermont has, in it's
library, one of his gilded wood sculptures which depicts
many of the world's
alphabets.
Starship
Alpha-Omega
More
info
He
currently teaches the "Wednesday Group" in the
Carriage House Studio at the
Library Arts Center in Newport. He was asked to take
over the group several
years ago when it's original leader, well known British-American
artist Aidron
Duckworth, passed away.
-by
Susan Cliver Purinton
