CHARLES GARABEDIAN (1923–2016)

Artist Charles Garabedian has died, reports the Los Angeles Times’ Jill Leovy. Renowned for brightly colored paintings portraying scenes based on Greek literature and daytime TV, Garabedian “injected an imaginative California sensibility into contemporary art,” wrote Leovy. He earned a master’s degree at UCLA, where he later taught, and was featured in a solo show at the Whitney Museum in 1976. The next year, he was named an NEA fellow; he then received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1980.

In addition to the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles have his work in their collections. Yet many of his supporters felt Garabedian often received less recognition than he deserved: “He makes no compromises,” said artist Ed Moses, an old friend. “He is just into the painting as painting.”

Critic David Pagel once wrote of Garabedian, “There is no escaping from his wily art.”