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Carson Lee Gladson
Carson Lee Gladson, 83, renowned California landscape artist, died on September 14, 2023, in Pasadena after a prolonged battle with Parkinson's disease.
Born in Lexington, Kentucky, to the Rev. Dallas and Mary (Mitchell), Gladson moved to California as a toddler and lived in the state for the rest of his life. For many years, his father was the chaplain at San Quentin Prison and the Gladson family lived on the island there.
After studying at Chapman University, University of California, Berkeley, UCLA and California State University at Fullerton, Gladson taught for 40 years at El Camino College, the second-largest community college in the United States, where he instructed in painting, drawing and design. His work is in the collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art and The Hammer Museum, as well as many other national and international museums and corporate collections.
Gladson enjoyed an international reputation as a landscape painter, although initially he pursued abstract paintings that featured subtle color and extensive use of biomorphic shapes. At 19, he had his first one-man show at the Long Beach Museum of Art, which drew a rave review in the Los Angeles Times by art critic William Wilson and so impressed the museum director that he bought a work for his personal collection, as did members of the museum staff.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the majority of his output was large-scale drawings that featured the transcendent use of color and light and could be characterized as ethereal works. Many of these drawings were of specific locations in Southern California, Oregon, Washington and Vancouver, BC, while many others are mythic creations from the artist's mind. He has been referred to as a California plein air (outdoor) artist and there are clearly correlations, but his work is too contemporary for that to be a fully accurate characterization.
As a result of repetitive injury to his hands, Gladson transitioned to employing iPads to create new images. He never stopped making art until the progress of Parkinson's made it impossible.
He is survived by his daughters, Hope Demetriades, Rose Gladson and Genevieve Gladson; grandsons, Lucas Demetriades and Theodore Demetriades; sister, Diane Reiman; niece, Wendy Miller Taylor; grandniece, Haley Hartzell; grandnephew, Carson Miller and son-in-law, Alexander Demetriades.
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