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Skalagard, Hans (1924-2017) USA (3)

Catégorie : PEINTRES

SkalagardHVHans Skalagard is a world renowned marine painter. He has been described as a "living legend" by art critics. Hans is a descendant of Vikings and was born in the Faeroe Islands of Denmark in 1924.

He began painting at the age of 8, and at the age of 14 began to carry on the family's seafaring tradition, becoming an apprentice seaman aboard a four-masted, square-rigged Nordic sailing ship. The sinewy and genial native of the Faroe Islands, a collection of rocky specks out between Norway and Greenland, transitioned to internally powered vessels and throughout World War II and for two decades beyond traversed the world as a merchant mariner.

Three times during the war, ships were sunk from beneath him by German submarines. He never got over the resentment that he and the war’s other civilian seaman were not granted the same benefits as the Navy sailors and other GIs alongside whom they worked and often were injured or killed.
Were there a lull in his duties on cargo ships, Skalagard would find a place to paint. He portrayed what he loved: history’s most majestic, storied, sea-plowing ships.

SkalagardHVA descendant of Vikings, Skalagard became a renowned and prolific maritime artist. From the mid-1960s to mid-1990s he operated a gallery in Carmel with his late wife, Mignon. The couple semi-retired to Petaluma in 1997. Early each morning, Hans Skalagard went to work painting small to enormous, exactingly accurate images of great sailing vessels.
He became too frail to paint only three weeks before he died on March 3 at the age of 93.

Skalagard’s paintings of actual sailing vessels — among them barques, Viking longships, galleons, clippers, frigates, lumber schooners, Down Easters and American Cup yachts — covered the walls of his little, country house in Petaluma. They hang also at maritime schools, museums and galleries around the world, and in the homes of admirals and collectors.

Though largely self-taught, Skalagard studied for a time at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen and with painter and illustrator Anton Otto Fischer, during WWII the artist laureate of the U.S. Coast Guard.
Skalagard received many awards for his work and in 2013 was inducted into California’s Scandinavian American Hall of Fame. He joined the likes of Olympic skater Sonja Henie, football coach Knute Rockne, entertainer Victor Borge and “Father of the Green Revolution” Norman Borlaug.

Skalagard declared in the 2010 interview, “The ships are my life and they’ll continue to be until there is no more life. When they finish with me, they’ll throw me back out to sea.”

Hans Skalagard - 3 PAINTINGS
Columbia
1100x733
Scene from the 1903 America's Cup Race
2280x1866
America's Cup racing yachts
800x618

 

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