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Ralph Love was born in Los Angeles, California April 18, 1907. He died May 26,
1992 in Escondido, California. For many years, Ralph Love taught as well as
painted. His students were made up of avid artists throughout Southern
California, and their classroom was the wide-open spaces. On rainy days, the
class would meet in the old Art Shack in Temecula, California, which Love opened
in the mid-fifties. It was from this Art Shack that his work received national
recognition.
Ralph Love was perhaps most well known for painting the Grand Canyon and
California landscapes. "Arizona Life" (magazine) featured his work on the cover
and on the inside spread, showing several of his original oils. Senator Barry
Goldwater owned several of Love's Grand Canyons, and a letter from him
stated,"...Love is the finest living American artist I know, and I could look at
his work all day long."
Love's desert scenes are immortalized in Palm Springs at the Palm Desert Museum
through dioramas. Another of these unique displays can be seen at the historical
Mission Inn in Riverside, California. The Frontier Museum in Temecula,
California has honored Ralph Love in their museum publication with two pages of
his contribution to the area through his art. The late Erle Stanley Gardner, who
commissioned a Love painting of his ranch, is the only other person in this
publication.
Ralph Love paintings are hanging in several other museums throughout the West,
including the Northern Arizona Museum in Flagstaff, Arizona, the Phillips 66
Museum in Oklahoma, and the Leanin' Tree Museum in Boulder, Colorado.
Ralph Love is listed in "Who's Who of International Art", in the Tenth
Anniversary edition of the "Southwest Art Magazine" hardcover contemporary
artist listings, Prize Winning Paintings published in New York, and has been
featured several times in Southwest Art, Artist of the Rockies, Western Art
Digest, and Art of the West. He is listed in the Edan Hughes reference book of
Early California Painters from 1840 to 1940.
Though art was his career from his youth, Ralph Love was also an ordained
minister. He often used his art in the ministry, and would combine the two in
special meetings in churches all over the West. A very special treat for the
congregation was when he would pick up the violin and play a medley of favorite
hymns. In his studio, he always painted to classical music, and would often stop
painting to play his favorite passages on the violin.
Ralph Love received no formal art training, but was literally self-taught. It
was when he was about eleven or twelve, his teacher took the class to the Los
Angeles Museum of Art, and he discovered what he wanted to do. He remembered
standing in front of one of the old Flemish masters, and it just came to him. .
. "I can do that!" And he did.
As a young artist, he had the privilege of painting for two years with Sam Hyde
Harris. This was the only real "formal" training Ralph Love had. The rest was
from avidly devouring all the art books in the library he could find.
Bertha, Ralph Love's wife of 62 years, passed away in 1996. She handled the
business part of the art for many years. Together, they raised four children.
Marian Brown owns a secretarial service in Oakland, California; Evelyn Norris
lives in Carlsbad, California; Corwyn Love is retired from McDonald-Douglas
Corporation and living in Garden Grove, California; and Lee Love Youngman owns
the Lee Youngman Galleries in Calistoga, California.
(Source: Askart.com)
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