Charles Frace
Wildlife Art
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Charles
Frace - Charles Frace was born in 1926 in a small
town in eastern Pennsylvania. He began drawing at five and taught himself to paint when he was fifteen. Frace remembers wanting to be
an artist from an early age. His self-instructed
talent earned him a scholarship to
Philadelphia’s Museum School of Art, where he graduated
with honors. In 1955, Frace began a professional career as a freelance
illustrator in New York City. Eventually, he became one of the nation’s most sought-after illustrators of wildlife.
However Frace soon grew frustrated by the restrictions of illustrating ideas conceived by others and longed
to paint some of his own. He finished only one, which his wife Elke took to a nearby art gallery. They insisted on
displaying the painting in the gallery, and it sold that same afternoon. In
1973, with the issue of Frace’s first limited edition print, he
had finally made the permanent change to fine art. Frace brings to his art over three decades of personal
research and a close kinship with animals. Frace and his art has been the subject of two books. Perhaps the greatest honor of his career came in October 1992, when
Frace as recognized with a one-man exhibit of thirty-six of his paintings at the National Museum of
Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. |
