1950), Karl helped revitalize the use of pastels to paint outdoors or en plein air, as the French described regarding the practice of working directly from nature.
His father was a minister and a writer, but it was his mother who encouraged Karl's artistic development through her own interest in design and the arts.
Karl quickly climbed up the union ladder and was soon painting his own large billboards for Foster & Kleiser and then for Pacific Outdoor Advertising.
Fortuitously, Bernardo "Barney" Sepulveda, a senior co-worker at Foster & Kleiser, introduced Karl to the iconoclastic figurative painter and Early California pastelist Theodore Lukits.
Known as a staunch traditionalist, Lukits' own work and teaching career helped preserve the ideals and methods of the late-19th-century French ateliers and academies.
[5] Karl immediately recognized and respected Lukits' knowledge and mastery of pastel and oil landscapes, formal portraits, still lifes, and anatomical drawing and knew he had found a teacher and mentor.
In spite of a generally retiring nature, he developed close friendships with a number of his co-workers in the billboard industry and several of his fellow art students.
At that time painters like R. H. Ives Gammell (1893–1981) in Boston and Lukits in Los Angeles were two of the few fine arts teachers whose instruction was based on the ideals and techniques of the 19th century French École des Beaux-Arts.
The Beaux-Arts method had evolved over hundreds of years from the Renaissance through the 19th century and was brought to perhaps its highest level of refinement by Parisian masters like William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Leon Bonnat (1833–1922).
Lukits, who had been teaching since 1924, was a respected California portrait, landscape and still life painter whose work was popular with the film community.
He was an award-winning graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago where he had studied with a host of Parisian- and European-trained painters including Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939), Edmund H. Wuerpel (1866–1947), Edwin Blashfield (1848–1936), Karl Albert Buehr (1866–1952), Wellington J. Reynolds (1865–1949), Richard E. Miller (1875–1943), Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872–1930) and Robert Henri (1865–1929).
[11] From the time he was young, Arny Karl had always loved the outdoors and when he entered the atelier of Theodore Lukits, it was the elderly painter's large collection of Plein-Air Pastels that made the deepest impression on him.
Karl, Solliday and Adams also made longer sketching trips to the High Sierras, Utah, Yellowstone National Park and the Canadian Rockies.
These three painters worked almost exclusively in pastel and dedicated themselves to championing that medium as a method ideally suited to capturing the rapidly changing natural conditions that an artist encountered out of doors.
[13] Karl held his Plein-Air pastel works closely, seldom exhibiting them or showing them to anyone except his fellow artists, a practice he learned from his teacher and mentor, Theodore Lukits.
In large part because of Karl's influence, by the late 1970s, a number of painters were working out of doors in the Plein-Air Pastel tradition that artists like Theodore Lukits and William Louis Otte (1871–1957) had established in the 1920s.
According to Morseburg, because of the intense colors, the paintings did not sell well and after working with Karl for a number of months, the business relationship faded.
[15] Jones encouraged Karl and purchased and sold a number of his paintings including both figurative and landscape works in oil and pastel.
While he seldom sold his pastel studies early in his professional career, by the mid-1990s, his dealer convinced him that his most personally revealing works were the ones done from nature and that the revival of interest in California Impressionism meant that there was a much greater appreciation for Plein-Air paintings.
He had problems with his eyesight, including severe cataracts that interfered with his ability to paint and his artistic production ceased for months at a time.
According to Morseburg's essays, Karl's earliest pastel works from the late 1960s and early 1970s were "blocky" with bold strokes of color.
Sierra Autumn, Big Sur Overlook and Mono Lake, all of which were shown in public exhibitions, are all examples of these detailed pastels.