251 Bob Kuhn -Seal Hunter

SOLD
Winning Bid Undisclosed
This item SOLD at 2018 Apr 07 @ 14:28UTC-7 : PDT/MST
Category Art
Auction Currency USD
Start Price NA
Estimated at 80,000.00 - 120,000.00 USD
Seal Hunter
Artist: Bob Kuhn
Date of Birth: 1920-2007
Medium: Acrylic
Dimensions: 24 x 36 inches
Signed: Signed lower right
Verso: Signed and dated 2003 verso
Frame/Outer Dim: 31 x 43
Like many artists in his generation, Bob Kuhn started out as an illustrator, contributing renderings of animals to books and periodicals. In 1970, he turned his attention exclusively to easel painting and eventually inherited the mantle worn by Wilhelm Kuhnert and Carl Rungius as the finest interpreter of big game animals. Kuhn balanced a desire to capture his subjects accurately with a flair for design that transmits the essential cycle of action and stillness in the natural world. In Seal Hunter, a polar bear sniffs the wind, a puff of steam moistening his nose. Bold stripes in the ice alternate from the lower edge of the canvas, which may well be the beginning of open water. The broken reflection of the bear shimmers. Kuhn balances the bear with the tipped-up ice shelf; they rival one another for solidity. But what is perhaps most arresting is the low band of cloud–pink and purple–in the otherwise unbroken blue sky. It creates an above and below, an earthly, watery world and a celestial realm with a sort of vaporous boundary. Makes you think the Arctic must be a wondrous, otherworldly place.