NON-DISNEY PAINTINGS

After his retirement in 1966, Carl Barks began to explore the world of painting. He had dabbled briefly with watercolours on earlier occasions but he found the work so interesting and tempting that he decided to let it alone! For how else would he have time for his comic book stories? But when he began his golden years (which turned out to be a correct phrase in more ways that one, as he also earned a pretty penny during his retirement) he started to paint with oils and watercolours under the supervision of his wife Garé who was a very skilled landscape painter. When Garé met her husband she put her career on the backburner, in order to help him with the comic book stories, but now they both started to pursue their individual painting careers. Carl painted with both watercolours and oils while Garé stuck to her magnificent oils which were reproduced in great numbers as postcards enabling a wide audience to admire them. For the first four years Barks mainly painted portraits of young girls in exotic surroundings. Then he started to paint landscapes. His work was 'interrupted' in 1971 when he received special permission from Disney's to paint the ducks.

In 1977 - when the permission was revoked - he launched a new idea for his motifs. He grandiously referred to it as Famous Figures of History as they might have looked if their Genes had gotten mixed with Waterfowl.
Barks was always very interested in history and mythology - which also clearly comes across in most of his adventure stories - and he now energetically delved into history and mythology to find his themes. He painted a great number of mythical and historical figures with mixed genes as seen in the following pages.
The characters in the Waterfowl Series were always human but they had beaks and similar features. The scenes always had to be surprising and humorous. The Good Artist never forgot his comic book background!

In 1982 Barks received another licence to paint his beloved ducks and the production of historical paintings stopped. In a way it is a shame that this brilliant idea was abandoned but we can all take great joy in the fact that Barks had such a fascinating hobby that we fortunately can all share today.