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After beginning his career as an illustrator, Douglas Allen has emerged as one of the strongest colorists among today’s wildlife painters. Adept both at portraying animals as well as their landscape settings, Allen creates vivid images that sparkle with light and capture the tensions and quiet dramas of life in the wild. Whether depicting animals against broad backdrops, such as high mountain lakes, vast rolling grasslands, and misty forests, or in more intimate environments, Allen’s works establish a strong sense of place and mood. His closely observed, painterly images carry on the legacy of such noted painters as Frederic Remington, William R. Leigh, and Carl Rungius.
Encouraged by his father, who collected books, prints, and paintings by Remington, Allen began to draw animals during his grammar school years in his native Jersey City. He received his first official art training in weekend painting classes at the Ford Art School in Jersey City, and during his teenage years he spent his free time drawing animals in the Central Park and Bronx Zoos. In 1953, he enrolled at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, where he studied with W.J. Aylward (a student of illustrator Howard Pyle), John R. Grabach, and Colonel Charles Waterhouse.
Through his father, Allen met the prominent wildlife illustrator and artist Paul Bransom. In the summer of 1960, he headed west to study at Bransom’s Teton Artist School in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. For a month he drew and painted horses and landscapes and for the first time observed elk, bear, bison, and pronghorn in the wild.
In the late 1950s, after a term in the National Guard, Allen was hired to illustrate a series in Outdoor Life magazine entitled “Big Game Animals of North America,” written by Jack O’Connor and George Goodwin. Allen produced twenty oils of animals and eighty pen-and-ink drawings for this project. The series, which ran for twenty months, was published as a book in 1961. In the years that followed, Allen became a principal illustrator for Outdoor Life and created images for many other books and magazines. A major turning point in Allen’s career occurred in the 1960s. Because wildlife magazines were beginning to rely more heavily on photographs, Allen turned to painting full-time. He soon won acclaim for his painterly approach and strong feeling for color and design.
Drawing on his broad knowledge of wildlife art, Allen has written a number of important articles on artists of the outdoor scene including Remington, Arthur B. Frost, N.C. Wyeth, Carl Rungius, Charles Russell, Philip R. Goodwin, and Lynn Bogue Hunt. He also wrote a biography and bibliography of N.C. Wyeth (1972). In 1980 Allen took up bronze sculpture.
The range and significance of Allen’s art was recognized in retrospective exhibitions in 1995 at the Hiram Blauvelt Art Museum in Oradell, New Jersey, and in 1999 at the Newington-Cropsey Museum, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. An active participant in many exhibitions and wildlife art organizations, the artist is represented in the collections of the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta; the Riveredge Foundation, Calgary, Alberta; the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, Wyoming; the Outdoor Life Collection, New York; the Boca Raton Museum, Florida; the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin; and the Johnson and Johnson Corporate Collection.
Allen currently lives in Centerville, New Jersey.
LNP
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