Carl Faber Abstract Composition — Oil on Canvas, Signed Lower Left

The canvas opens with a collision rather than a composition — purple orbs of different weights orbiting a central white void, a single red line slicing diagonally through the field like a fault line, hard-edged color zones in orange, gold, and teal pressing against biomorphic forms that seem to breathe. Near the lower left, loose black calligraphic strokes unravel into something between gesture and glyph, signed Faber in the same loaded brush. Up close, fine green loops of scribbled underdrawing surface inside the larger forms — the artist's process visible, unretouched, and intentional. From across a room the painting reads as pure chromatic force; approach it and the internal logic of its making becomes its own subject.

This is studio work from Carl Faber's Gila period — the final and arguably most concentrated chapter of a painting life built on decades of desert observation. After years in the East Mojave, where his commitment to field painting (directly from nature, never from photographic reference) drew attention from the Sierra Club, Friends of the Mojave Road, and both local and national press, Faber and his partner Adrienne Knute arrived at Gila Hot Springs, New Mexico, in 2004 and made it their permanent home. The present canvas carries the compressed chromatic energy and restless formal invention that defined his studio practice — a sensibility honed first in commercial sign painting, then sharpened by thirty years of reading light and color in the Mojave and Gila landscape. His sign-painter's discipline is audible in every mark: single, confident strokes that do not go back to correct, a calligraphic clarity that keeps the surface fresh rather than overworked.

Carl Faber trained in commercial art at a vocational school in Delaware and worked professionally in sign painting, metalwork, business displays, and silkscreening in Florida and California before committing himself entirely to easel painting. In 1972 he moved to the East Mojave desert, where a philosophy of sustained, first-hand observation of the natural world became the engine of his practice. His austere desert lifestyle and distinctive landscape paintings attracted a loyal following; the Sierra Club and Friends of the Mojave Road regularly brought visitors and buyers to his remote studio throughout the 1980s. He illustrated Adrienne Knute's botanical study Plants of the East Mojave, published in 1991 and reprinted in 2002 — a project that demonstrated both his draftsmanship and his deep engagement with the Mojave ecosystem. He accepted students on a non-commercial basis, insisting his teaching "would have nothing to do with money," passing on a technical philosophy grounded in direct perception, chromatic precision, and the singular mark. Faber's experiences with LSD in the 1960s shaped his perceptual outlook in ways he believed gave him an unusually acute sensitivity to color, light, and structural relationships — a sensibility carried through directly into canvases like this one. He spent his final years in the Gila wilderness near Silver City, New Mexico, where this work originates.

Faber's work sits at an intersection that appeals to several distinct collecting communities: mid-century abstraction enthusiasts drawn to the Kandinsky–Miró lineage his palette and biomorphic geometry evoke; New Mexico and Gila-region art collectors building holdings tied to the state's working painter tradition; and buyers who respond to the counterculture-to-landscape narrative of artists who genuinely left the commercial world to pursue a philosophy. The Gila and Silver City art scene has produced a small number of painters with this kind of biographical density. Faber is one of them, and his easel work from the Gila period is held entirely in private hands. This canvas is unframed and arrives ready to hang or present to a framer — a straightforward opportunity to acquire a signed, documented example from the artist's final body of work.

CONDITION

Very Good. No remarkable damage. Colors are bright and vivid, the canvas is taut and sound on its stretcher, and the paint surface shows no cracking, flaking, or restoration. A clean example.

DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS

• Overall: 24" H × 18" W × 1.5" D
• Medium: Oil on stretched canvas
• Signed: "Faber," lower left, in black
• Unframed