AUCTIONS Scottsdale Art Auction 2016 Sioux

213 Sioux

SOLD
Winning Bid Undisclosed
This item SOLD at 2016 Apr 02 @ 14:09UTC-7 : PDT/MST
Category Art
Auction Currency USD
Start Price 12,500.00 USD
Estimated at 25,000.00 - 45,000.00 USD
Sioux
Artist: Riley, KennethDate of Birth: 1919-2015
Medium: Oil on board
Dimensions: 14 x 14 inches
Signed: Signed lower right
Verso:

Ken Riley was born in Missouri in 1919. He loved both music and art, played the drums and painted. But art sunk its hooks deep, and he soon found himself studying, first in Kansas City with Thomas Hart Benton, then in New York with George Bridgman and Harvey Dunn. When the Second World War broke out, Riley put his talents to work as a combat artist stationed on the U.S.S. Middleton, a converted commercial liner that saw a great deal of action in the Pacific Theater as an attack transport. After the war, Riley made a name for himself in illustration, spending the next quarter of a century producing work for Bantam Books, The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, McCalls, Redbook, National Geographic, Reader’s Digest and Life magazine. An illustrious career with the Society of Illustrators took him through Korea, Japan, Libya, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. It was in the American west, however, where Riley found his passion for fine art and began to create paintings at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, Grand Teton National Park, the Black Hills, the Badlands and in the Southwest where he became a charter member of the National Academy of Western Art in 1973. In 1982 he became a member of the Cowboy Artists of America. He received the prestigious Stetson Award in 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1991, gold medals in 1984, 1988, 1989, 1993, and silver medals in 1983, 1987 and 1995. Riley also won the Prix de West in 1995. Illustration’s loss was Western Art’s gain. Riley never looked back, and we have never looked away. His paintings can be found in important public and private collections across the nation and around the world, including the White House, the Smithsonian Institution, the Booth Western Art Museum, and the Phoenix Art Museum.
Ken Riley adapted his skills as an illustrator to easel painting, developing a signature style in Western Art that owes something to classical bas-relief sculpture, Renaissance fresco, and the mural tradition. In the Preface to the book, West of Camelot: The Historical Paintings of Kenneth Riley, art historian Susan Hallsten McGarry sums up Riley’s approach: “Riley uses the past as inspiration and then passes through it to personal revelation about the harmony and perfection to be found in the human condition. On the pediments of the Parthenon and on the ceilings and walls of Renaissance churches we find the classical ideal Kenneth Riley portrays...” Riley’s unerring sense of design creates a stillness, an air of myth and legend. He focuses our eyes and accentuates the drama of the moment. Attention to craft that demonstrates the breadth of his artistic and historical education means that Ken Riley is a crucial connection, perhaps the crucial connection, between the early masters of the West, the Golden Age of American Illustration and the contemporary Western Art scene.
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