Clark Hulings Estate

Clark Hulings (1922-2011) was born in Florida and raised in New Jersey. Over his lifetime, he resided in New York, Louisiana, and throughout Europe before settling in Santa Fe in 1972.

Clark’s ability to see beauty in daily human gestures and activities won him the appellation “master” on numerous occasions. His celebration of textures as expressed through light, shadow, and atmosphere “describes the air itself,” according to the Christian Science Monitor. His range of subject matter was astonishing, “No one does as many things as well,” proclaimed Southwest Art. His modesty in the face of such acclaim was legendary. Throughout his career he maintained a personal profile far lower than his national reputation.

Hulings' art training began as a teenager with Sigismund Ivanowsky and the famed draftsman George Bridgman and continued at The Art Students League with Frank Reilly. With a degree in physics from Haverford College, Pa., Hulings pursued an initial career as a portraitist in Louisiana, followed by freelance illustration in New York, notably paperback book covers, during the 1950s.

By the early 1960s, Hulings devoted himself to easel paintings. In 1965 he debuted in New York, N.Y., at The Grand Central Art Galleries. In 1976 he was the subject of a solo exhibition at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Center, Oklahoma City, OK., which was documented in the book Hulings—A Collection of Oil Paintings (Lowell Press), followed in 1978 by a retrospective at the Museum of the Southwest, Midland, TX, and a 1981 exhibition at the C.M. Russell Museum, Great Falls, MT. Hulings’ work was the subject of one-man exhibitions in 1999 at Nedra Matteucci Galleries, Santa Fe, and in 2007 at J.N. Bartfield Galleries, New York, and Morris & Whiteside Galleries, Hilton Head, S.C. In 2011 The Forbes Galleries, NY mounted a Hulings show with examples of work from every decade of his career.