Ken Carlson was born in Morton, Minnesota in 1940. When he was confined to bed for a year with rheumatic fever, drawing was his distraction, but his parents "had never seen an oil painting and they didn't have the means to further my study." The winner of a "Draw Me" contest, he received a scholarship to the Art Instruction School and still remembers the excitement of running to the post office to get his lessons. At seventeen, he commuted to Minneapolis to study with the dean of the School, and when he graduated from high school he attended the Minneapolis School of Art for a year before going into commercial art. For two years, he illustrated "Birds of Western North America," moved to San Francisco, and then in 1970 he concentrated on oil paintings of wild animals.