Max Starkloff

We recently worked with the Starkloff Foundation to make reproductions of a few of Max Starkloff’s original paintings. Starkloff, a St. Louis native, was involved in a car accident in 1959 that left him a quadriplegic. About four years after his accident, he was placed into a nursing home located in Eureka, Missouri that was managed by Franciscan Monks. There he met Brother Matthew who offered to teach Max how to paint by holding a brush between his teeth. In 1969, he gave up painting to became an outspoken leader in the movement for independent living and disability rights. Over the course of his life, he became a “relentless and uncompromising force on behalf of disabled people,” and Co-Founded Paraquad in 1970, with his wife, Colleen. Prior to 1969 he produced a stunning body of work like the example shown below, strongly influenced by the German Expressionism movement.  Our work with the foundation involved capturing the original paintings with a superlative level of detail and color accuracy, and then creating an edition on cotton rag papers with archival inks.

Starkloff-1-Low-Res