The son of an innkeeper, Black was raised in rural Viola, Wisconsin in the Kickapoo Valley, where many of his childhood friends lived on a nearby Indian reservation. Largely selftaught as an artist, he began to draw and paint using vegetable juices, earths and red keel, which the Indians used for ceremonial decoration. However, when his family moved to Chicago, he studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts between 1906 and 1908.

Black worked as an illustrator and newspaper artist in Chicago, Minneapolis and New York, spending his summers touring and sketching in the West, researching for illustration and commercial art work. Health problems forced him to move to Taos in 1925, where he executed some of his best work, painting the Pueblo architecture, Indians and the snowcovered peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. His style was characterized by broad brushstrokes, often achieved with a palette knife, blocks of bold color, with little detail, simply portraying the essence of the Southwest, which he painted from life whenever possible.

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton