\"Co-Creator Limited Edition Art Print\" Ray Harm Signed Album Page For Sale

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for sale the "Co-Creator of Limited Edition Art Print" Ray Harm Signed Album Page. 

his paintings of wildlife, primarily birds. He was also well known for art

marketing and is generally credited as the co-creator of the limited

edition art print market, which supplanted the traditional

method where artists sold original works on an individual basis. Limited

edition art prints are now the standard method of marketing paintings and

similar works to the general public. Harm was born Ray Auvil in Randolph

County, West Virginia; his father was a concert violinist who also

was a woodsman and herbalist. His name was

changed to Harm after his parents divorced and his mother remarried to William

Harm. He left West Virginia in his mid teens to become a cowboy in the

American West, eventually competing on the rodeo circuit and also training

horses for the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus.

His service in the United States

Navy during World War II allowed

him to take advantage of the GI Bill for

continuing education. Harm used the opportunity to enroll in art school and

afterwards became a painter. While selling individual paintings, Harm worked in

construction and horse training to make ends meet. In 1961 Harm's work

attracted the attention of Wood Hannah, a businessman and art The two men came up with the idea of making high-quality

art prints of Harm's paintings, which would be issued in limited print runs.

The idea was a great success and gave birth to a marketing method for art that

has brought commercial and financial success to thousands of artists. In 1963,

he was appointed the first H. L. of

Kentucky. Harm later wrote a weekly nature column for The

Louisville Times, and was a popular speaker and lecturer. Harm was a

frequent guest on the radio call-in

show Metz Here, hosted for many years by Milton his later life, Harm became a sharp critic of artists who

copy their works from photographs by tracing directly over them or projecting

an image onto a canvas and then tracing. This practice is now widespread

throughout the limited-edition art industry. Harm has prided himself on basing

his paintings on his own sketches taken from direct observations of wildlife.

On occasion, Harm says he has used museum models of

wildlife to get certain details correct, but otherwise his paintings come

directly from his own work. Harm closed production of prints from his major

collection in the late 1990s, with 195 pieces in the collection. He continued

to do occasional works as fundraisers for various organizations. Harm and his

wife, Cathy, eventually left Kentucky and settled

on a ranch in Arizona,

where he continued to work. His son, Ray Harm Jr. (better known as

"Hap"), lives in Kentucky and sells prints from original works by his

father that were not a part of the original major collection. An archive of

Harm's signed prints, newspaper clippings, field notes, black and white

photographs, exhibition catalogs, gallery announcements and 53 pieces of

original correspondence is housed at the Filson

Historical Society in Louisville. Harm died in Sonoita, Arizona on

April 9, 2015.