Word: hurd
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Never High Noon. "A painters life is determined by daylight," says Hurd, who knocks back an unvarying breakfast of eggnog, toast and coffee at sunup, then goes riding across the juniper-knobby hills. He may dismount, whip out a tiny watercolor set and sketch a bit of his domain. These glimpses are pulled together in his studio, where Hurd toils in the meticulous technique of egg tempera. The results, recently on view at Fort Worth's Amon Carter Museum of Western Art and opening last week in San Francisco's California Palace of the Legion of Honor...
...Hurd rarely paints high noon. "All phases of light, its constantly changing patterns, thrill me," he says. With each painting, he increases his dissection of his skeletal landscape through the hours and seasons of the sun. "I feel like shouting This is me.'" The wilderness, indeed, is Hurd. One of the few times he ventured abroad was as a LIFE artist-correspondent during World War II. Friends urge him to travel, but he says, "Nuts. I'd be painting postcards...
Jehovah's Witness. Though Hurd was born in New Mexico, he has Eastern ties. His father was a Boston lawyer who settled in dry New Mexico for his health. Hurd attended West Point for two years, quit because art interested him more than mathematics. He recalls that his father-apparently ignorant of the aborted West Point career of James McNeill Whistler-responded by saying, "You are an utter jackass...
...young artist's idol was the lusty illustrator, N. C. Wyeth; one fateful day the grand old man telephoned him. "It was like the Lord Jehovah calling," says Hurd...
...work for me," announced Wyeth, "West Point will seem like child's play." On the train to Wyeth's famous colony at Chadds Ford, Pa., Hurd met his future wife, N. C.'s daughter Henriette, then 16, and now an accomplished artist herself. N. C. taught Moby Dick and Dostoevsky as well as painting. "He was a terrific stickler for detail," recalls Hurd, who became fast friends with Andrew Wyeth during his six-year apprenticeship. "We have in common the ability to identify ourselves with objects," says...