Harry Carmean Anaprox advertizement

Few people know that Harry Carmean has done some commercial work over the span of his career. He did the back cover of the rock group Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell album in the late 1970's. Here is a job he did for Anaprox, a well known pain reliever, completed sometime in the late 1980’s. Its one of the classier medical ads I have seen in a long time. The drawings were done specifically for the advertisement and depict various areas of pain which Anaprox treats. One of Carmean's regular models, Joe Miller, can be seen in the large drawing.

German expressionism and Harry Carmean's drawing

Harry Carmean has an expressionistic side that rivals the German Expressionists of the 1920’s and 1930’s. As can be seen in these drawings, he is quite comfortable using jagged and lively lines as well as distorted proportions in his drawings even though he is associated with more a classic approach. His most powerful expressionistic drawings were done in the late seventies through the 1980's.

Harry Carmean's teacher Lorser Feitelson

The drawings above are by Lorser Feitelson, a well known abstract and figurative Los Angeles artist. It was no wonder that after walking in on Feitelson life drawing class at Art Center, that Harry Carmean's life was forever changed. The above examples show Feitelson's incredible skills in drawing the figure and in them we can see the root of Carmean's development as an artist. For my mind, these drawings show a complete understanding of the techniques of the European old masters but they are unique because they were done by an American artist in modern times. Feitelson had a large collection of old master drawings which was published in a catalogue and is available online.