BIOGRAPHY
Artist and teacher Franklin Faust painted landscapes, seascapes, and still lifes in a uniquely vivid color palette of watercolors and oils. A native of Iowa, he entered into a competitive scholastic program at the University of Chicago in 1943. Faust was fourteen. After completing the two-year program, he spent a year traveling around the United States, painting its diverse landscape.
Further education brought him to Stanford University, where he developed a friendship with the art collector Sarah Stein who read him letters written to her by Henri Matisse. Faust returned to the University of Chicago, continuing his undergraduate degree in fine arts. Upon graduation, he spent time in Orleans, France, where he painted murals and collected pigments mixing his paints by hand.
In one of the letters Stein read to the young Faust from the mature Mattise, he stated, "Now I understand what art really is." To honor his arrival at the same age as the great French artist when he wrote those words, his former student Sarah A. Pletts composed the dance theater production "Henri's Letters," depicting Faust's relationship with Sarah Stein. It debuted in New York at The Stella Adler Studio of Acting before moving to the Dorcas Library in Prospect Harbor.
Faust's paintings and life spanned many places and times, including graduate work in Iowa, teaching at Pratt Institute for over thirty years, a stint at Sacramento State University, and a two-year painting sojourn in Franco's Spain. Until his death, the artist continued his brilliantly simple craft in Maine.
