"A Prairie Refrain" at Carole Peck's Good News Cafe

Contemporary realist painter, Karl Hartman, will exhibit his new show titled “A Prairie Refrain” from November 30 through January 27, 2015 at Carole Peck’s Good News Cafe and Gallery, 694 Main Street South, Woodbury CT.

Carole Peck’s Good News Cafe will welcome Karl with an opening reception from 3 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, November 30, 2014. The public is cordially invited to meet the artist, view his exhibition, and learn more about his work while enjoying complimentary hors d’oeuvres and wine.

Hartman’s paintings focuses on his memories of the prairie landscapes that he grew to love and his evolvement with these landscapes as a geologist in Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas. Hartman describes this part of the United States as spare, quiet and infinitely dynamic, beautiful and terrifying all at the same time. In contrast to his painting of the plains, he is also working on drawings of Bergen County, New Jersey that reflect the tightly packed, crowded suburban local domestic world of this area as well as its occupants and their imprint on it.”

Karl Hartman was born in Billings Montana and grew up mostly in the plains states of Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. He received his BS from the University of Oklahoma majoring in geology and minoring in art. He received his MFA in painting from the School of Visual Arts in New York where he studied with Sam Cady, Ursula von Rydingsvard and John Lees. He lives with his family in New Jersey and travels back to Oklahoma to see family, take photographs and sketch.

Karl shows at the Mary Ann Doran gallery in Tulsa, OK and the New Arts Gallery in Litchfield, CT. He has exhibited at the Kansas Museum of Fine Art in Wichita, KA, The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, OH, The Charles A. Wustum Museum, Racine, WI. He has also shown at The Grand Central Galleries, The Adam Baumgold Gallery, and the National Academy of Design in New York as well as the Yoyogi School of fine art in Tokyo Japan.

His most recent award was the New Jersey State Council for the Arts Fellowship for painting.