Raymond Kursar

Kursar art career training began in 1966. He attended the School of Advertising Arts in Portland, Oregon. This exposure afforded him an artistic position in the advertising department of Lipman & Wolf Company. After honing his illustration skills at Lipman & Wolf Company by 1969 he saved enough money to relocate to New York City. There Kursar was hired by a Madison Avenue advertising agency from 1969 to 1972 where he created product and label packaging designs. In 1973 to 1979 Kursar began illustrating for several publishing houses and greeting card manufactures. He created greeting cards for the American Artist's Group as many contemporary artists like Chen Chi, Eyvind Earle, Norman Rockwell, Ralph Avery, Hans Moller, who also created seasonal greeting card designs year after year for the American Artist's Group.

From 1979 to 1985 Kursar illustrated a number of today's popular American magazines, and his illustrations appeared in Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Reader's Digest and National Lampoon. He has also illustrated hundreds of romance novel covers for book publishers such as Bantam Books, Ace Books, Random House and Pocket Books & Zebra Books, Avon, Fawcett, Ballantine, Doubleday, Charles Scribner & Sons, etc. In 1979 Kursar was commissioned by the Knowles China Plate Company to illustrate on fine china the movie classic Gone with the Wind. This collectable plate collection was featured as the cover story in the June 1983 issue of Plate World Magazine.