ARTIST: Eugene Clay (California, 20 century)
NAME: Nat Goodwin Bwings Automobile to Rawhide, NV
YEAR: 1974
MEDIUM: oil on canvas board
CONDITION: Some scrathes/paint losses. No visible inpaint under UV light. Some damages to frame.
SIGHT SIZE: 30 x 24 inches / 76 x 60 cm
FRAME SIZE: unframed (In-House framing available)
SIGNATURE: lower right
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
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SKU#: 121949
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BIOGRAPHY:
In the late 1920s Eugene Clay was a high school student living in Bisbee, Arizona. At that time the city was a center for copper mining and to a lesser extent both gold and silver was mined there as well. The city itself had changed little since it was built around 1900, so, during his teenage years Clay had the experience of living in an old time western environment.By the 1930s he was living in Southern California. He studied art while living in Claremont and worked as an assistant in the chemistry laboratory at Pomona College. Clay was a competent fine art painter and an up and coming commercial illustrator.Most of his fine art falls into the category of American Scene or Regionalist style art. For subject matter, Clay focused on everyday scenes of American life from the era in which he lived and from the era of the prior generation.From a young age he was fascinated with airplanes and learned to fly World War 1 surplus planes. The era of "Barnstorner" aviation performances with radical flying maneuvers, wing walkers, and parachute jumping antics was coming to an end, but Clay was able to get into the action during the final days.During the middle of his career Clay worked out of his art studio in Los Angeles. To make a living he primarily produced photography, commercial art and mural painting. Clay was an expert inking artists and produced many black and white inked works. He was also involved in setting up art exhibitions in Southern California.On the side he produced a series of oil paintings inspired by his life experiences with barnstorming and others inspired by stories of gold mining in California, Arizona and Colorado. By the early 1970s he had produced a large number of paintings of both the barnstormers and the gold rush era. At that time he decided to publish and sell prints of many of these works.The prints were published and sold through a distribution center set up in Culver City. They were widely distributed. Some were signed by the artist and others were sold unsigned for an inexpensive price in packets of four. He registered copyrights for these in the early 1970s. At that time Clay dated most of the works 1972 or 1974 on the front of the art next to his signature, even though a number of the paintings were actually painted much earlier, some as far back as the late 1940s. Aviation related murals by Eugene Clay were produced for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics located near the Los Angeles County Airport.