Creator Record
Metadata
Name |
Looney, Ben Earl |
Notes |
Ben Earl Looney is an American painter best known for his depictions of the Cajun landscape and inhabitants of Southwestern Louisiana. He was born in the Yellow Pine community on June 2,1904 in Webster Parish, Louisiana. He graduated from Minden High School in Minden, Louisiana in 1923 and afterwards attended Louisiana State University School of Journalism in Baton Rouge, Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., and the Summer School of Arts in Eastport, Maine. In 1935, Looney moved to Baton Rouge to teach art, and from then moved across the United States in various other teaching positions in Florida, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, North Carolina, and finally moving to Lafayette, Louisiana where he began most of his Cajun works. He painted scenes in all parts of the United States, Canada, and Mexico and exhibited at galleries in New York, the Delgado Museum in New Orleans, Duke University, the University of North Carolina and the University of Washington. One of his paintings hangs in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife, Ladybird, were particularly fond of Looney's work, and commissioned five watercolors from him. Though Looney's published work was watercolor, most of his artistic talent was applied to oil or acrylic and is in private family collections. He published numerous books, which he both wrote and illustrated, including Beau Sejour: Watercolors of Louisiana Plantation Country (1972), Watercolors of Dixie (1974), Cajun Country (1974), Drawings of the Vieux Carre (1976), and Cajun Vignettes (1978), among others. Looney never married and passed away on May 25, 1981 from complications relating to Parkinson's disease. |
Nationality |
American |
Occupation |
Art educator and painter |
