George Earle: A Retrospective

Wild Card

George Earle: A Retrospective
(October 8 - October 31)

George F. Earle is 95 years old and still painting with the same passion for his craft that emerged when producing his first oil painting at age eight. Delavan Art Gallery is pleased to honor this accomplished artist and his creative legacy through a retrospective curated by his family. The display in the gallery’s Wild Card space opens with a reception from 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm on Thursday, October 8, and remains up through Saturday, October 31.

Throughout George Earle’s adventurous life, he has managed to combine his love of painting with his passion for skiing and urge to write. In his early years growing up in New Bedford, MA, the pursuit of artistic studies coupled with the desire to experience better snow conditions brought him to Syracuse University to the undergraduate art school that remains one of the oldest in the country, and to the hills of Upstate New York that allowed him plenty of opportunity to ‘hit the slopes.’

Back then, Earle started the University’s first ski team, and many years later, he would return to that campus to teach design and art history before moving on to SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, School of Landscape Architecture where he now holds the title of Professor Emeritus. 

During the years between 1933 and today, Earle traveled an exciting journey. In 1937, he was awarded a Tiffany Foundation Fellowship and spent the next year painting in Mexico. In 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, Earle interrupted his advanced studies at Yale to enlist in the army, where for four years he served as an instructor and coach of the great 1944 10th Mountain Division ski team. After the war, he returned to SU to teach art and direct what was, at the time, the largest ski school in the country.

Throughout his journeys, Earle continued to paint whatever subject was at hand and would later publish books visually documenting his adventures, both with palette and written words. In The Road Less Traveled, Earle recounts his escapades in Mexico, while Birth of a Division takes the reader through the first operation that established the 10th Mountain Division as an important part of the U. S. military force that remains so today.

Following are the artist’s comments on three of the paintings included in Delavan’s display. Of “Mexican Caretaker,” Earle says: “In Mexico, I rented a small house complete with a maid who slept on the front step and did my cooking and laundry. It is among the many paintings I sent home that year.” He says “Water Under The Bridge” was painted in New England and adds, “the stream crossing, dark with pine trees, shows the complicated patterns of water in it’s eddies and turns.”

The painting, “Clark Reservation” was done first as a quick sketch to show his Landscape Architecture class ‘a few tricks’ when brought there to paint from the reservation’s natural scenes. “Later, I enlarged and developed the sketch,” Earle says. “I was particularly interested in the snake like tree trunks and beams of light through the trees.”