G. Harvey grew up in the Texas Hill country listening to his father and grandfather relate stories to him about ranch life, the old frontier days in Texas and driving cattle across the Red River. During the earlier part of his career, he began to draw inspiration from that collective memory for paintings that would eventually earn him the reputation as one of America’s most recognized and successful artists. He graduated from North Texas State University. He taught school in Austin but continued to study art in his spare time and ultimately began to devote full time to his painting.
In 1965 he won the prestigious New Masters Award in the American Artist Professional League Grand National Exhibition in New York. This award proved to be the pivotal point of his career. The scenic beauty of the land where G. Harvey grew up lends itself to his wonderful art, which often depicts the strong independence of the people in the region. He says, “My paintings have never been literal representations. They are part first-hand experience and part dreams generated by those early stories I heard.
They are a product of every place I have been, everything I have ever seen and heard.” He has experienced several decades of sell-out shows. A special honor was bestowed upon him with a series of one man shows in Washington, D.C. in 1991. The first show featured his paintings of the Civil War era at the National Archives and then a show was exhibited at the Treasury Department, culminating in a spectacular one-man show of 35 paintings at the Smithsonian Institute as part of their exhibition of “The All American Horse.” G. Harvey has been featured in several exhibitions at the Gilcrease Museum and his alma mater honored him with a Distinguished Alumni Award. One of his paintings was featured on the cover of Smithsonian Institute’s 150th anniversary engagement book. He has had four books published, and recently had passed away in 2017.
