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Ad Code: 3
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from Auction House Records.
Immigrants Stopping by Devils' Tower
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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Biography from AskART:
| Born in Devon, England, Roy Kerswill came to the United States via Canada when he sailed a cedar canoe in river waters from Canada to New Orleans, on a year long trip. This made him aware of pioneer experiences and heritage, the subject of most of his paintings. He has written a book titled "A Pictorial Story of the Oregon-California Trail," the result of six years of research and painting along the Oregon Trail.
He has worked in both oil and watercolor, and his subjects include Western historical scenes and landscapes of the rugged and picturesque Teton Mountain Range in Wyoming.
Apparently he was a precociously gifted boy as he received a scholarship to the Bristol College of Art when only eleven years of age. From 1946-1948, he served three years in the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm, and he then traveled to Canada, and worked his way East to West as a laborer, an assistant engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railroad, a cowboy for a Calgary rancher, and on a highway survey crew in Whitehorse, Yukon.
Intending to go to New Zealand, Kerswill and a friend instead canoed, in 1950, down the Columbia River into the United States, and up the Snake River to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, their journey making a story interesting to newspapers along the way. His destiny was sealed upon seeing and struggling through the incredible scenery.
Kersill lived in Jackson Hole for many years before moving to Polson, Montana, late in his life.
Kerswill's paintings were collected by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, as well as Senator Barry Goldwater, Laurence Rockefeller and actors Burt Reynolds and Dick Van Dyke.
When LeJay's Sportsmen's Cafe in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, closed in 2003, "The Rogues Gallery," a group of paintings Roy Kerswill made of ranchers, politicians and other well-known local figures over the years, will be relocated, likely to the Jackson Hole Historical Society.
Kerswill once described why he was an artist. "I paint with the same need as I eat. I paint because it is an adventure into something strange and beautiful. I paint because it is pleasurable; like smelling the rain, touching a child, loving a woman, singing to the wind or listening to the hushed roar of the wind in the forest. As I strive to reach and understand this thing, I become attuned or embued with something very beautiful, and it is this exciting sensation which drives me on."
Roy Kerswill died in 2002.
Source:
http://www.colemanart.com/gallery/kerswill/kerswillbio.html
http://www.powersmuseum.com/shop/shopselect.html
http://www.jhguide.com/Archives/FeatureArchive/2003/030430-feature.html
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| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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