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Robert Howard Hunter’s works display his facility with many different mediums as he developed techniques in which to reflect his view of the surrounding world. Stylistically, his early works, largely lithographs, are dark images inspired by landscape elements, whereas the later work is boldly colorful and semi-abstract in exploration of advancements in 20th century technology.

Hunter was born in Auburn, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. Between 1947 and 1949 he studied printmaking, oil painting, and basic design and watercolor painting at Oregon State University. He transferred to the University of Oregon, 1949 to 1953, where he obtained his Bachelor of Science and Master of Fine and Applied Arts degrees and taught figure drawing. He was drafted into the Army in 1953 and, in 1954, was transferred to Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, where he met Sigmund Abeles, William Halsey, and Edmund Yaghjian, while working at Columbia Museum School. He was married in 1955, the same year he was discharged from the Army, and promptly pursued courses in mixed media at the University of South Carolina for the next year. Over a period of thirty-six years, from 1956 to 1992, Hunter taught printmaking, painting, and basic design and was the head of the visual studies program in the College of Architecture at Clemson. In between that span, he received a Fellowship in 1965 directed by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served on the Rudolph Lee Gallery Exhibition committee at Clemson for twelve years, becoming director for a period of 3 years. In 1972 he moved to Greenville, SC, where he was a part-time instructor at the Greenville County Museum School of Art. From the 1970s through the 1990s, he traveled extensively both nationally and internationally–largely exploring states and museums along the East and West coasts–often documenting historic buildings and sites in watercolor. Following his retirement in 1992, he relocated across the country to Skagway, Alaska, where he owned and operated a gallery of his work. In 2003, he returned to his native state of Washington.

Ever experimental with new approaches, Hunter made ink drawings, molded serigraphs, and eight-millimeter movies. Many of the serigraphs deal with space exploration in bright primary colors. Featured in Jack Morris’s volume, Contemporary Artists of South Carolina (1970), Hunter, recognizing he had so many unrealized ideas, commented: “Sometimes I wish I had a half dozen craftsmen at my disposal.”