His teachers included Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still and he was a classmate of Richard Diebenkorn, who was also a mentor,[4] James Budd Dixon, Walter Kuhlman, Frank Lobdell, and George Stillman, which whom he created a portfolio of 17 lithographs.
[6][nb 1] Drexler and Hultberg were married and three years traveled and lived in Mexico, the West Coast and Hawaii.
[9][nb 2] By 1983, Drexler moved year-around and permanently near Lighthouse Hill on Monhegan Island, an artists' haven off the coast of Maine, where she had spent most summers since 1963.
The quality of swiftly changing light, atmospheric conditions, water patterns, as well as imagery inspired by the island – lobster boats, traps, ropes, kerosene lamps and the like – seeped into my paintings.
[4] In the mid to late 1950s, Hultberg, along with his colleague and friend Norman Carton, worked at and regularly exhibited at the Martha Jackson Gallery.
His paintings were influenced by his time spent at Monhegan Island, and his career thrived after he moved to Portland.
[4] His work was part of a group show at Aucocisco in Portland in February 2005, at which time he was living in New York City.
[3] Mr. Hultberg made a name for himself in the 1950s with powerful landscapes, fractured into slabs under ominous horizons; multiplicities of bizarre, huddled shapes; and dense, semiabstract urban wastelands dappled with harsh brilliance and vague human touches.
Their air of mystery and forceful use of color earned him awards at exhibitions that began in the 1950s and continued for five decades.