Ray
Harm (November
9, 1926 – April 9, 2015) was an American artist, best known for
his paintings of wildlife, primarily birds. He was also well known for art
marketing and is generally credited as the co-creator of the limited
edition art print market, which supplanted the traditional
method where artists sold original works on an individual basis. Limited
edition art prints are now the standard method of marketing paintings and
similar works to the general public. Harm was born Ray Auvil in Randolph
County, West Virginia; his father was a concert violinist who also
was a woodsman and herbalist. His name was
changed to Harm after his parents divorced and his mother remarried to William
Harm. He left West Virginia in his mid teens to become a cowboy in the
American West, eventually competing on the rodeo circuit and also training
horses for the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus.
His service in the United States
Navy during World War II allowed
him to take advantage of the GI Bill for
continuing education. Harm used the opportunity to enroll in art school and
afterwards became a painter. While selling individual paintings, Harm worked in
construction and horse training to make ends meet. In 1961 Harm's work
attracted the attention of Wood Hannah, a businessman and art collector
from Louisville,
Kentucky. The two men came up with the idea of making high-quality
art prints of Harm's paintings, which would be issued in limited print runs.
The idea was a great success and gave birth to a marketing method for art that
has brought commercial and financial success to thousands of artists. In 1963,
he was appointed the first H. L. Donovan Artist-in-residence at
the University of
Kentucky. Harm later wrote a weekly nature column for The
Louisville Times, and was a popular speaker and lecturer. Harm was a
frequent guest on the radio call-in
show Metz Here, hosted for many years by Milton Metz on
Louisville's WHAS-AM.
In his later life, Harm became a sharp critic of artists who
copy their works from photographs by tracing directly over them or projecting
an image onto a canvas and then tracing. This practice is now widespread
throughout the limited-edition art industry. Harm has prided himself on basing
his paintings on his own sketches taken from direct observations of wildlife.
On occasion, Harm says he has used museum models of
wildlife to get certain details correct, but otherwise his paintings come
directly from his own work. Harm closed production of prints from his major
collection in the late 1990s, with 195 pieces in the collection. He continued
to do occasional works as fundraisers for various organizations. Harm and his
wife, Cathy, eventually left Kentucky and settled
on a ranch in Arizona,
where he continued to work. His son, Ray Harm Jr. (better known as
"Hap"), lives in Kentucky and sells prints from original works by his
father that were not a part of the original major collection. An archive of
Harm's signed prints, newspaper clippings, field notes, black and white
photographs, exhibition catalogs, gallery announcements and 53 pieces of
original correspondence is housed at the Filson
Historical Society in Louisville. Harm died in Sonoita, Arizona on
April 9, 2015.