Biography from Altermann Galleries and Auctioneers, Santa Fe - II:
| Gary Niblett
Representational painter of the working cowboy in the high country, born in Carlsbad, New Mexico in 1943 and living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Niblett was profiled in New Mexico Business Journal as an example of art for investment because he can’t paint enough to meet the demand. “I’m two years behind,” he declares. “I’ve got a waiting list a mile long. A lot of my paintings are being sold at much high prices, but at my age, I must try to hold my prices down.”
He says, “my ambition ever since I can remember was to be a painter out on my own.” When he was in high school, his parents paid $380, “a tremendous sum,” for them, for his correspondence course from Art Instruction. After a year at Eastern New Mexico University, his evident talent caused him to transfer to the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles, but his “funds ran out real quick. The rest has been on my own.” Hanna-Barbara animation studios soon recruited him as a background artist. After nine years, he had saved enough to move to Sedona, Arizona, to paint full time.
“ I don’t like anything modern,” he says. “My goal is to paint loosely but accurately. I paint with a brush and it should look that way.” A turning point was his election in 1976 as the youngest member of the Cowboy Artists of America. When he travels now, he claims that you’d think we were movie stars,” but Western artists don’t get much attention in Santa Fe and “in a way it’s nice.”
Resource: Contemporary Western Artists, by Peggy and Harold Samuels 1982, Judd’s Inc., Washington, D.C.
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Biography from Claggett/Rey Gallery:
| | Gary Niblett was born and raised in Carlsbad, New Mexico, attended the Art Center School of Design in California and became a commercial artist until 1973 when he decided to focus his career on fine art. Gary’s versatile work demonstrates the human values, which are brought to bear in the living, not only in the American West but the entire world. He prefers reflecting on the quieter, subtler moments of his daily life. Frequently he is drawn to an earlier time, a time of horse-drawn wagons, small picturesque villages, quaint and colorful clothing of bygone eras. Gary enjoys traveling to Europe and Mexico in particular where he feels he is really going back in time. The texture of old houses, barns and wagons he feels are wonderful to paint. Gary has tried to analyze his desire to paint these quieter moments. He has found that his motivation goes back to a simpler way of life that he enjoyed while visiting his family on the farms and ranches in west Texas. As he says, " I had a wonderful boyhood." |
Biography from AskART:
| | Born and raised in Carlsbad, New Mexico, he had the American West as a part of his daily life. Recognizing his talent, local ranchers paid him to do portraits of his horses. He attended the Art Center School of Design in California and spent eight years with the Hanna-Barbera studios as a background and animation artist. In 1973, he left commercial art to focus on his own work, and in 1976 was elected a member of the Cowboy Artists of America. He and his wife, Monica, returned to New Mexico to live, and his painting focuses on quiet moments of human life in the American West. |
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Gary Niblett is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Western Painters
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