Born in rural Kentucky, Henry Lawrence Faulkner overcame an orphaned childhood to lead a vivid bohemian lifestyle as an artist of some renown. His early artistic promise was rewarded with a scholarship to the Louisville School of Art; he later studied with Millard Sheets, Margaret Montgomery, and Pierre Sicard at the Los Angeles County Art Institute. In 1942, he embarked on a lengthy period of travel that took him around the country and included a brief commitment to a Washington, DC. psychiatric facility; while hospitalized, he befriended fellow patient and poet Ezra Pound. The artist settled in Lexington, Kentucky in 1956 in order to pursue his artistic and poetic interests. Working from there, he created still life paintings, as well as animal and figural works, usually executed in a highly keyed palette with a whimsical sensibility.