Biography
Brad Teare has been carving woodcuts for over twenty years. Six years ago he began painting en plein air and fused his love of woodcuts with his love of the landscape. He spent the eighties and early nineties illustrating for publishers such as The New York Times and Random House, where he did book covers for authors such as James Michener and Ann Tyler.
He grew up in Kansas revering artists such as Rockwell Kent and Lynn Ward and worked summers at a small letterpress print shop. After High School he traveled to Northern Idaho and built a log cabin in the foothills of Moscow Mountain where he spent a year painting in watercolor. It was tough painting through the winter when the days were short and all he had was a kerosene lamp but he stuck with it and slowly began to learn the fundamentals.
That summer he worked in the Cascade Mountains building trails. It was there amid the beauty of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area that he knew that someday he would devote himself to landscape. He then left for two years to Argentina where he continued to fill his sketchbook with drawings of gauchos, Patagonia, and Italianate architecture. On his return from Argentina he enrolled at the University of Idaho.
Like a lot of schools in the late seventies and early eighties, they were obsessed with abstract expressionism. It was a difficult time for realists. His professors openly scoffed at pursuing a realist tradition. One professor facetiously said during a critique, "if you're going to draw that way you might as well be an illustrator."
After the initial sting wore off, Teare decided it wasn't a bad idea. He transferred to Utah State University and studied illustration for three years. After finishing his studies, he and his wife packed up their belongings and headed for New York City. During his first day in the city he made the rounds to a variety of publishers.
Weary from so much walking (he was too frugal to take the subway) and finding himself in Times Square he decided to see if the New York Times needed any illustrations. He could at least get out of the heat and rest for a while. Within a few minutes he was talking to an art director and was given his first assignment, a story about the Galapagos Islands.
He was one of the pioneer illustrators of that era who built a successful career on the age-old technique of woodcut printing. In 1993 his dream of painting and drawing the Western landscape reasserted itself and he moved to Providence, Utah, a small town in the Rocky Mountains where he maintains his printing studio.