Eyvind Earle was an illustrator, author, animation art director and background artist. He did backgrounds for a number of Disney’s notable short films in the ’50’s and was the background artist and art director for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty feature length animation. He also worked on Lady and the Tramp and Paul Bunyan.
His illustrations appeared in Time, The New York Times, The New York Sun and The Los Angeles Times, among others. His designs have also been the center of successful lines of greeting cards.
He focused in his later career on images for gallery display and is represented by Gallery 21 in Carmel California. In the gallery’s site you’ll find Earle’s limited edition edition serigraphs (screen printing, often anachronistically called “silkscreen”).
His landscapes are very stylized and yet highly evocative of time, season and atmosphere. He uses color combinations that in lesser hands might dissolve into treacle (read: Thomas Kinkade), but in service of his swirling oriental art and 1960’s animation inspired compositions work remarkably well.
There is an article on the Cartoon Modern blog with some images of his Disney production work.
There are a couple of beautiful, but unfortunately expensive, volumes of his work: The Complete Graphics of Eyvind Earle and Selected Poems and Writings 1940-1990 and The Complete Graphics of Eyvind Earle and Selected Poems, Drawings and Writings by Eyvind Earle 1991-2000.
Earle is also featured in the short Disney documentary “4 Artists Paint 1 Tree” which is included on the special edition DVD release of Sleeping Beauty.
Thanks to Cully Long for the suggestion and information.
Wow…. great work - graphics and colours are really impressive. Nice to compare to some older japanese masters (Jakuchu, Hokusai). Thanks for the continued good posts!
Man, I just saw some original Earle paintings recently at the Oakland Museum, a special gallery for Disneyland, and his craftmenship is insane. Thanks so much for the post. Truly inspiring
I wish I could paint like that. He’s above and beyond amazing. I’d love to see his work in person.