A childhood friend of my fathers in Chicago during the 50's, Michael Hurson, was a talented young man going into the Art Institue of Chicago. My father purchased four paintings from him in the early 60's where they hung in our home until I convinced my parents to give them to me for my new house in Los Angeles (as an adult.) Every day they brighten my day (and now my 5 year old daughters.)
For over 35 years, my family had lost contact with Michael, but about 5 weeks ago, I tracked him down through the Paula Cooper Gallery in NYC, and I immediately emailed him. I got a wonderful response from him, but sadly last week he died suddenly. Today, I feel guilty that I didn't share enough with him my appreciation of his work.
Roberta Smith wrote a very nice obituary for Michael in this weeks New York Times.
(Some Highlights) "Michael Hurson, a New York-based artist whose drawings and paintings imbued human and inanimate subjects alike with a stylish caricatural energy, died on Jan. 29 in Nyack, N.Y.. He was 65 and lived in Garnerville, N.Y"
"Mr. Hurson combined a gift for drawing with a sharp intelligence cloaked in whimsy and often took inspiration from Burr Tillstrom, a longtime friend and the creator of the influential puppet show “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” broadcast on television from 1947 to 1957."
"In an increasingly nuanced yet insistent, subtly Cubist drawing style of angled planes and tweedy textures, Mr. Hurson also made portraits of pencils, coat hangers, drinking fountains and a Pinocchio puppet purchased in Italy, as well as actual people.
In the 1990s, he began translating famous masterpieces into this style, including Picasso’s “Guernica,” Masaccio’s Adam and Eve from the “Expulsion From Eden” and, most recently, Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte,” which he knew intimately from his days at the Art Institute of Chicago.
His work is represented in numerous public collections, including those of the Modern, the Whitney, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis."
Michael, many thanks for the beauty you brought to the world.
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