Mel Hunter, Tennessee Walker, Signed Lithograph

Hand drawn, stone lithograph from the "Horses" Portfolio by Mel Hunter published in 1973. This lithograph is 22" x 30" and is signed in pencil and numbered in an edition of 500. Printed on Arches paper. Domestic shipping-$20, international depends upon location. Mel Hunter was born in Oak Park, Illinois and grew up in the mid-west of the thirties. In 1953, he talked his way into his first paid job as an artist-illustrator at the top of the pay scale at Northrop Aircraft. For nine months, he painted astronomically correct starry backgrounds for the Snark missile program by day and paintings of imaginative expeditions to Mars and other far off places by night. In nine months, enough of these nocturnal flights of artistic fancy were selling to the booming Science Fiction magazines of the period to form the basis for free-lance freedom. From that day until August 1967, Mel Hunter turned out many hundreds of major science and technology related paintings for Life, Newsweek, Time-Life Books, National Geographic, Encyclopedia Americana, North American Aviation, Douglas, Convair, USAF, NASA and many others. During this period, he became perhaps the main painter of subjects relating to science and the budding space exploration program. At the peak of his career in 1967, he came to the realization that emphasis on science and technology had grown out of all proportion to the thought devoted to the rest of our daily lives and to the needs of the environment. Nobody in the art world, except for Andrew Wyeth, was speaking for our shrinking rural countryside, our diminishing clean air and water, and vanishing wildlife. So he came to Vermont to draw and paint the land and its wildlife and to write and illustrate books for children on what nature and the Earth are really all about. In the ensuing five years, his paintings and drawings have sold to many collectors. More than two hundred original watercolors and oils of birds have sold through the galleries of Abercrombie & Fitch in New York and the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Mel Hunter passed away in 2004.