Carson Gladson (1940-2023) American, Signed and Numbered Serigraph. Title: "Arboretum Vista." Original image painted in 1999. Signed in pencil bottom right. Numbered 730/950 in pencil bottom left. Envelope attached to back with a Certificate of Authenticity giving title and date of January 19th, 1999. 

Overall Size: 29 x 36 in. 

Sight Size: 18 1/4 x 25 1/4 in. 

Carson Lee Gladson was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1940. At the age of two the family moved to California, where Gladson’s father became the chaplain of San Quentin State Prison. When he was 12 a prisoner who had befriended the family gave Carson a set of paints, and he soon began experimenting with creating still lifes and landscapes. At 14 he submitted a painting to the Oakland Museum of Art, but after critiquing and turning down the work he began to focus on music composition instead. When he enrolled at Chapman College to study composition, he showed the head of the art department his work on the recommendation of a friend, and the professor convinced him to switch majors after just one week. He gained an international reputation as a landscape painter, although initially he pursued abstract paintings that featured subtle color and extensive use of biomorphic shapes. At 19 he had his first one man show at the Long Beach Museum of Art, and he went on to study at the University of California - Berkeley, UCLA, and California State University before becoming a teacher of art, first at CSU in Northridge and then for almost 40 years at El Camino College in Torrance. During the 1970s and 80s the majority of his output was large-scale drawings that featured the transcendent use of color and light and could be characterized as ethereal works. Many of these drawings were of specific locations in Southern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, often created en plein air. By the late 2000s he was having difficulty creating due to repetitive injuries to his hands, but an assistant helped Gladson transition to employing iPads to create new images. He never stopped making art despite diminishing health until his death on September 14th, 2023 in Pasadena after a prolonged battle with Parkinson’s disease. Today his work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, and The Hammer Museum, as well as many other national and international museums and corporate collections.