Carl Rice Embrey Art

Carl Rice Embrey was born in Hamilton, Texas, in 1938. After receiving his MFA from the University of Texas in the mid-1960s, Embrey took on a teaching job at the Art Institute of San Antonio, where he remained on the faculty until the school’s closure in 1993. In 1997, San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum organized a one-man retrospective of Embrey’s work, one of a series recognizing five of the state’s most respected artists. At the start of his career in the 1960s, Embrey was essentially a non-representational painter, heavily influenced by the Abstract Expressionist movement dominant at the time. From there, he gradually incorporated representation into his work until arriving at the meticulous realist landscapes and interiors he creates today. Embrey is greatly inspired by his ancestral home in Hamilton, where his family has lived for over a century. The artist typically spends 800 to 2,000 hours on a painting and remarks, “The thing about art is that one never gets to that elusive truth, which is another word for the perfect painting. I love the challenge of constantly pursuing that truth.”