ARNOLD FRIBERG 1913 - 2010
Biography
Arnold Friberg, the son of Scandinavian immigrants, was born on December 21, 1913 in Winnetka Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. At the age of 3 Arnold moved to Arizona with his sister, Gertrude, and his parents. By age 7 young Friberg was already drawing original cartoons. Mr. Friberg remembers, "I never had to take an aptitude test, I always knew what I wanted to do, Art".
The Fribergs were able to scrape together enough money to enroll Arnold in a correspondence course at the age of 10. While in Phoenix Arizona, young Friberg often shared his drawings with the newspaper staff of the Arizona Republican and he learned from them. During his high school years, Arnold earned money by making signs for local businesses. After graduating from high school, he began his studies at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.
While attending the Academy, Arnold worked part-time for printers. Arnold stayed in the Chicago area for several years and worked in the commercial art field. It was during this time that he became aquainted with the Northwest Paper Company and their ad campaign featuring the Canadian Mounties. Little did he know the importance this would play in his future. In 1940, Arnold moved to New York City into the publishing world of Manhattan. While there, he enrolled in night classes at the Grand Central School of Art, where he studied with Norman Rockwell under Harvey Dunn, one of the countries top illustrators.
In 1948 Arnold accepted a commission to do scenes of the American West for a calendar series by the Louis F. Dow Calendar Company. This would become the start of his serious interest in the West. By 1950 Arnold and his wife had moved to Utah, and Arnold started teaching commercial art at the University of Utah. During his teaching a great producer and director Cecil B. DeMille was planning his immense production of "The Ten Commandments". DeMille was in need of an artist with both "the rare talent and inner vision to set down in paint, all of the power, the color, the human drama." After a long search, which included Europe, a publisher friend in Sweden sent DeMille prints of Arnold's scriptural illustrations. Demille knew he had found his artist.
“All you leave the world is what you've done. No one will ever know the conditions, the comments, the pressures. Only the work remains.
“What I do I am driven to do. I follow the dictates of a looming and unseen force. I try to become like a musical instrument, intruding no sound of its own but bringing forth such tones as are played upon it by a master's hand
Galllery
Western
Religous
Native American
