Garé Barks: Paintings and Drawings 1961-1981

While most people know Garé Barks as the wife of Disney comic-book legend Carl Barks, creator of Uncle Scrooge, she was also a professional and prolific artist, both as an assistant on Carl’s Disney comics, and as a painter of oils. Born in 1917 with one arm, Garé was a gifted and driven artist from a young age. In 1936, she graduated from the exclusive Punahou Academy — former President Barack Obama’s prep school alma mater. Garé was the first woman to receive a full-time scholarship to Boston’s acclaimed Vesper George School of Art, earning a record three more scholarships before graduating with honors. Her one-woman shows in the late 1930s earned her inclusion in the International Who’s Who of Women, and The International Blue Book. During WWII she inked and lettered blueprints for the company that would become McDonnell Douglas Aircraft. From 1952 to 1965 she worked as Carl Barks’s full-time assistant, marrying him in 1954.

During her comic-book career, Garé lettered and inked background details for over 3,868 pages of art and 300 stories, including some of Carl’s most famous Uncle Scrooge comics: classics like Back to the Klondike, the horseradish, Menehune, Atlantis, Tralla La, and Cibola stories, The Lemming with the Locket, the Fabulous Philosopher’s Stone, and more. Carl wrote: “She had a great influence on the way I did stories, and in turn the stories had a great influence on her. She might never have gotten into landscape and wildlife art without learning on those duck pages that there were personalities in the creatures and trees and skies and that an artist’s job was to bring out those personalities for viewers to see.”

After she and Carl retired in 1966, Garé began painting full time, completing over 450 oils — including dozens published nationally as prints and greeting cards — creating a unique style combining a modern approach to color with her cartoonist’s eye for simplifying shapes and forms. Tens of thousands of prints of her paintings — like the well-known Contours (the book's cover) — hung on walls all over America. Her work — over 400 paintings and dozens of drawings — is collected here for the first time.

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