In 1989, German publisher Ja
nssen-Verlag printed The Art of George Quaintance, an 80-page paperback with black and white illustrations of many Quaintance works. It included a brief biography written by publisher Volker Janssen. The book has been reprinted twice and is still in print. Until 2010, it was the only work about Quaintance ever published and it contains errors and inaccuracies. In 2010, Taschen published Quaintance, a large format art book with full-color reproductions of Quaintance's iconic male physique canvases and a brief biography. It's a spectacular book but the biographical data is sparse.
In 1996, Richard Hawkins, a Los Angeles artist, created a Web site partly devoted to Quaintance. The site incorporated personal research, along with archival information from the Tom of Finland Foundation. Hawkins expressed his hope to write an authoritative biography, but the subsequent loss of much of his material in a computer crash and a change of career led to him abandoning plans for a biography.
Hawkins was not the first to undertake a biography of Quaintance. In the early 1980s, a San Francisco writer named Ted Smith founded a nonprofit organization called the National Gay Art Archives, with George Quaintance foremost among the artists whose work they hoped to preserve. Smith contributed articles — also full of misinformation — to many gay periodicals of the time. He intended to write a biography, but his life was cut short by AIDS and today there is no vestige of the National Gay Art Archives.
In 1998, retired newspaper editor John Waybright, who lives in Quaintance's birthplace county in Luray, Virginia, found the Hawkins material online while attempting to identify the creator of two drawings he owned that were signed by Quaintance. John and Hawkins corresponded by email and John began a concerted search for information.
In Arizona, at about the same time, Ken Furtado, a long-time admirer of Quaintance, also discovered Hawkins's Web site. Ken traveled to Los Angeles to meet Hawkins, and upon learning of the planned biography, offered research assistance in Phoenix. Ken lives about two miles from the fabled Rancho Siesta, the locale of Quaintance's studio-residence during most of the final six years of his life. Hawkins demurred on the offer.
In 2002, Ken purchased a collection of Quaintance photographs at an estate sale and wondered what had become of the biography. An Internet search led him to John, and once the two confirmed that Hawkins had abandoned the project, Ken and John agreed to pick up the gauntlet and collaborate on a definitive biography. They split the work so that Ken would do the research and writing about the years Quaintance lived in the West, and John would do the research and writing about the years Quaintance lived in the East. The biography is now being prepared for publication.