Carl E. Schwartz

CARL E. SCHWARTZ

September 21, 2014

Long-time FGCU drawing and painting instructor Carl E. Schwartz died on Sunday, September 21. He passed away one day after his 79th birthday, following a multi-year battle with cancer.

In January of 1999, he joined the Art Program at FGCU as an adjunct drawing professor and became an instructor in fall 2005. He continued to teach full time until he "retired" in 2008, although he continued to teach one course per semester through the spring of 2013.

He was born in Detroit and educated at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago, where he earned a BFA degree. Carl taught figure drawing and painting in Chicago at the North Shore Art League for almost 30 years. He moved to Florida permanently in 1984. He lived, painted and tended his spectacular water garden with his artist wife, Celeste Borah, in Fort Myers, not far from the FGCU campus.

Carl Schwartz's artwork is in permanent collections throughout the United States, including the Smithsonian Institution, Kemper Insurance, AT&T, Sears, Delta Airlines, Beatrice Foods and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., as well as the British Museum in London. He had a 50-year retrospective exhibition in the FGCU Art Gallery in 2009, in which he showed watercolors, prints and acrylic paintings of his favorite subjects of water gardens and koi fish, landscapes and still lifes. He recently donated a painting to the university.

Carl taught with a remarkable passion and conviction. His students saw in him a practicing artist who was engaged in the pursuit of beauty. As an artist, he made many images that captured and created a very special kind of light. Perhaps more importantly, as an educator, he left his students with the tools, skill and motivation to make even more light.