Kenneth Riley Biography
a.k.a. Ken Riley  
A realist painter of the Old West and a highly successful illustrator, Ken Riley was born in Waverly, Missouri in 1919 and has had a studio in Tucson, Arizona from 1971.

He was raised in Kansas and received his art education at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he was a student of Thomas Hart Benton.  Aware of Riley's unusual talent, a high school art teacher had paid for his first semester of tuition at the Institute.  In 1941, Riley went to New York to study with Frank DuMond at the Art Students League*, and he also took evening classes at the Grand Central School of Art* and with illustrator Harvey Dunn.

Riley is a direct link between the great Western artists of the late nineteenth century and the Western artists of the contemporary scene. He has been a member of the Cowboy Artists of America since 1982 and has worked and painted alongside some of the twentieth century’s finest interpreters of the American West; including Robert Lougheed, John Clymer, and Donald Teague.

he was commissioned by the U.S. Park Service to create several paintings of the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. During that time, he decided to devote his work solely to Western subjects.