Carl Blair

Carl Blair (November 28, 1932 – January 22, 2018) was an artiste and, for greater than forty years, a zealot of the art skill at Bob Jones University.

A native of Atchison, Kansas, Blair earned a B. A. in art at the University of Kansas and a M.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute. In complement to his teaching at BJU, he next served on the art capability at KCAI summer programs and as a enthusiast of the cooperating capability at the Greenville County Museum of Art, where he taught evenings and summers for 25 years.

Blair exhibited his play-act in exceeding a hundred museums, art galleries and universities and won beyond ninety national, state, and regional awards. His works have been purchased for on height of 2500 private, corporate, and public collections. His exhibitions supplement the Art in Embassies Program; Ringling Museum of Art; Morris Museum, Augusta, Ga.; and the Hunter Museum, Chattanooga, Tenn.

In 1995, the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, S.C., hosted a major retrospective of his work. In 2000, a 40-year retrospective be active was held at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia.

Blair referred to his style as "neither reachable nor abstract. I attend to to my doing as visual poetry". Although best known for his oil, gouache, and acrylic paintings, late in his career, Blair began exhibiting sculpture, especially whimsical animals crafted of plywood or spruce pine boards and accessorized bearing in mind found objects such as marbles and screws. He recalled telling his BJU students to "never, never build up up and accept yourself seriously".

Blair did not discover he was color-blind until he was an art student at the University of Kansas; when asked to reach a self-portrait, he painted himself green. He as soon as called his color-blindness an asset because he was "not hindered by color combinations". After a critic called a Blair exhibition dull, inane. and colorless, Blair said he was inspired to use more competent colors in his work.

Blair served as a zealot of the South Carolina Arts Commission for twelve years and chairman of the commission for two. In 1970, he and two new members of the Bob Jones University art faculty, Emery Bopp and Darell Koons, founded Hampton III Gallery, one of the first announcement galleries in Upstate South Carolina. After he retired from teaching, Blair became president of the gallery, doing "everything from cleaning floors to selecting and hanging art."

In 2005, Blair was awarded the Verner Award for Lifetime Achievement, the highest award unmovable by the let in of South Carolina in the arts.

In 2013, the Greenville Metropolitan Arts Council (MAC) created the Carl R. Blair Award for commitment to Arts Education, an award final annually to a Greenville arts educator.

In 2016, MAC privileged Blair once the exhibition "Artists Touched by Carl R. Blair", which featured the decree of 55 Upstate artists who he had influenced and motivated. In the exhibition catalog, a fellow artist described Blair as "challenging, encouraging, helpful, witty, and inspirational to all his students".