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Gary Akers — Biography
| 1951 |
Born in Pikesville |
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Gary Akers is one of America's foremost contemporary realists, recognized for his expertise in watercolor, drybrush and egg tempera. Born in 1951 in Pikeville, Kentucky, he completed a Master's degree at Morehead State University in 1974 and spent the next year on a Greenshield Foundation Grant furthering his egg tempera studies.
Akers brings life to the simplest of subjects with his ability to build an image of great complexity from the small details of life. A porch, a weathered barn, a sunlit interior, a group of animals, whatever his eye lights upon is transformed by his mastery of light and shadow. Akers is particularly known for his highly worked paintings in egg tempera, a technique in which dried pigments are mixed with egg yolk and distilled water and layered in thin brushstrokes on a gessoed panel. Akers' egg temperas are built up of hundreds of layers, using the technique of cross-hatching, small strokes of color that are layered over one another to achieve subtle tonal effects.
Gary Akers’ work has been included in exhibitions at many museums, including the Speed Art Museum, the Frye Museum of Art, the Ogunquit Art Museum, the Asheville Art History Museum, the National Academy of Design, the Artists of America exhibition at the Colorado History Museum, and the Great American Artists exhibition at the Cincinnati Museum Center. Akers is a highly accomplished watercolorist, and has received major awards from the American Watercolor Society (where he is an elected Signature Member), the Southern Watercolor Society and the Kentucky Watercolor Society. Recently, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, purchased his drybrush watercolor, “Mrs. Lean Arthur”.
Over the past two decades, Akers has been featured in many books and periodicals including American Artist, Watercolor, Artist's Magazine, U.S. Art, Back Home in Kentucky, Southwest Art, Kentucky Images, Being an Artist, The Creative Artist and The New Spirit of Watercolor. Two major books of Akers’ art have been published, each with images of over one hundred of his paintings: Kentucky: Land of Beauty (1999), and Memories of Maine (2003).
Gary Akers first solo exhibition at the Hammer Galleries is scheduled for March 2007.
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