Carl Blair

Carl Blair (November 28, 1932 – January 22, 2018) was an performer and, for exceeding forty years, a devotee of the art gift at Bob Jones University.

A original 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 accessory to his teaching at BJU, he along with served on the art capacity at KCAI summer programs and as a aficionado of the cooperating facility at the Greenville County Museum of Art, where he taught evenings and summers for 25 years.

Blair exhibited his comport yourself in over a hundred museums, art galleries and universities and won exceeding ninety national, state, and regional awards. His works have been purchased for exceeding 2500 private, corporate, and public collections. His exhibitions increase 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 put-on was held at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia.

Blair referred to his style as "neither realistic nor abstract. I concentrate on to my produce a result 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 similar to found objects such as marbles and screws. He recalled telling his BJU students to "never, never add 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 get a self-portrait, he painted himself green. He past 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 intelligent colors in his work.

Blair served as a enthusiast of the South Carolina Arts Commission for twelve years and chairman of the commission for two. In 1970, he and two extra members of the Bob Jones University art faculty, Emery Bopp and Darell Koons, founded Hampton III Gallery, one of the first billboard 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 final by the declare 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 fixed idea annually to a Greenville arts educator.

In 2016, MAC honored Blair in the proclaim of the exhibition "Artists Touched by Carl R. Blair", which featured the put on an act of 55 Upstate artists who he had influenced and motivated. In the exhibition catalog, a fellow player described Blair as "challenging, encouraging, helpful, witty, and inspirational to whatever his students".