Born
in New York City in 1916, Eyvind Earle has enjoyed a prolific career spanning 60
years. From the time of his first one-man show in France when he was just
fourteen, the artist's fame has steadily grown. At the age of 21 Earle opened at
Charles Morgan Galleries, his first of many one-man shows in New York. The
response was so positive that the exhibition sold out and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art purchased one of his paintings for their permanent collection.
In 1951 Earle joined Walt Disney Studios as an assistant background painter. Earle intrigued Disney in 1953 when he created the look of "Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom" an animated short that won an Academy Award and a Cannes Film Festival Award. Disney kept the artist busy for the rest of the decade painting the settings for such stories as "Peter Pan", "For Whom the Bulls Toil", "Working for Peanuts", "Pigs in Pigs", "Paul Bunyan", and "Lady and the Tramp". Earle was responsible for the styling, background and colors for the highly acclaimed movie "Sleeping Beauty" and gave the the movie its magical, medieval look. He also painted the dioramas for Sleeping Beauty's Castle at Disneyland in Anaheim, California.
Earle's painting successively
synthesizes incongruent aspects into a distinctive style.