Sarasota Artist Edwin Brewer (1927-2002) American, Oil on Board. Depicts a forest at the edge of a beach and a lake and large clouds beyond. A ramp down to beach enters the picture from the right. Initialed "EB" lower right.
Condition: Small hole in upper right corner. Spotting throughout.
Overall: 31 1/2 X 25 7/8 in.
Sight: 23 1/2 X 17 3/4 in.
Depth: 2 1/2 in.
#3815 .
Edwin Cook Brewer and his twin brother, Adrian Brewer Jr., were born on January 9th, 1927 in Little Rock, Arkansas. They both received their early art instruction in the studios of their father, Adrian, and grandfather, Nicholas Richard Brewer, both renowned portrait and landscape artists. Adrian Jr. never pursued art past childhood, and Edwin enrolled at the Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Missouri when he was sixteen. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, first aboard a destroyer and later on a flagship cruiser, the USS Providence. When Brewer left the navy in 1946 he used the GI Bill to study at the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida. Unhappy with the curriculum, he began to take additional lessons at the nearby studio of renowned artist Jerry Farnsworth on Siesta Key. It was here that he met and married his wife Maegerine Thompson, a fellow artist, in 1948. After four years at Ringling he won a Guggenheim Foundation grant to study at the Institute de Allende in San Miguel, Mexico, where the couple acquired a vacation home so they could travel there to study art whenever they liked. Although Brewer pursued creating art as a profession, he worked as an art teacher and adviser for most of his life. In the mid-1950s he taught at the Farnsworth School in Sarasota, as well as at The People’s Art Center in St. Louis, Missouri. He later taught at the Museum School at the Arkansas Arts Center (now the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts) and Little Rock University (now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock). While serving as art specialist for the Arkansas Department of Education from 1963 to 1971, Brewer wrote “A Guide to Art Education in Elementary Schools of Arkansas” and “An Art Guide for High Schools.” He was also the curator for the first Arkansas Arts Center Artmobile. In 1969 Brewer was one of fifty artists chosen by the U.S. Marines to serve as a combat artist in Vietnam. The paintings and lithographs recording his impressions of the Vietnamese people and landscape have been circulated ever since by the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling exhibition service, and the artworks are documented in the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington DC. Brewer and his wife moved to Santa Barbara, California in the late 1970s to be near their three daughters. He became actively affiliated with the Santa Barbara Art Association and several local galleries, including Gallery 113, the Delphine Gallery, and the Faulkner Gallery in California. Landscape and still-life were Brewer’s specialties, and he alternated between oils and watercolors. His paintings hang in private and public collections, including the Smithsonian traveling exhibition service, the National Archives in Washington DC, the World’s Fair Offices in New York, and the Central Arkansas Library System’s permanent collection of Arkansas art in Little Rock. Brewer died of heart failure on December 14th, 2002, at Ventura Community Hospital in Ventura, California.
Condition
Small hole in upper right corner. Spotting throughout.
