1

Artist Northwest School

Birth-Death

William Henry Tappan

1821-1907

Biographic Info The movement's early participants, and its defining artists, have become known as "the big four": Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. Their work became recognized nationally when LIFE published a 1953 feature article on them. It was the first such broad recognition of artists from this corner of the world beyond traditional Northwest Native American art forms, which had been long recognized as "northwest art." These artists combined natural elements of the Puget Sound area with traditional Asian aesthetics to create a novel and distinct regional style, particularly in painting and sculpture, with some drawing, printmaking and photography. Tobey, Callahan, Graves and Anderson were all immersed in and greatly influenced by the atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest environment. Seattle was a common locale which they all shared at points in their lives, and some of them were closely associated for a time with the Seattle Art Museum in Volunteer Park. The town of Edmonds also figures heavily in the NW School, as Guy Anderson's hometown and studio were in Edmonds, and Morris Graves's home and studio were in nearby Woodway.[4] Over time, the influence of the natural setting of Western Washington, especially the flat lands, meandering river channels, and wide open skies of the Skagit Valley, became a unifying aspect of their art.[5] The media most commonly used by the painters in this group of artists were tempera, oil and gouache on canvas. They also used these media on paper and wood. Morris Graves worked for periods in three dimensional forms, using steel and glass and stone, among other materials. Guy Anderson, whose main medium was oil painting, also made works from bronze and had "collages" around his home of found objects from beach walks and deteriorating metal which he saw beauty in. These forms influenced his painting. The style of the Northwest School is characterized by the use of symbols of the nature of Western Washington, as well as the diffuse lighting characteristic of the Skagit Valley area. The lighting and choice of earthy tonal ranges in the color is one of the most important qualities of Northwest art. Tobey, whose artwork did not include as much natural Northwest subject matter, is identified as Northwest style because of the soft pastel colors which he used, and the dark mist chroma of lighting, with few stark shadows. The Northwest artists were labeled as mystics, although some forcefully denied this label. They denied being a "school" of art, but they did know one another. Callahan hosted salons in which the others participated. Anderson and Graves travelled together and painted in the North Cascades and elsewhere. Dealers such as Zoe Dusanne, Gordon Woodside and John Braseth of the Woodside/Braseth Gallery as well as museum professionals grouped the four artists together, as did journalists. Their styles showed unifying themes that suggested something unique and previously unseen from a far corner of the planet. A review of the titles of some of the paintings leads to spiritual interpretations of northwest life. In addition to the local natural setting and the Asian influence, the Northwest School also shows some influence from surrealism, cubism and abstract expressionism. The cubist influence is shown to some extent in Kenneth Callahan’s Prism and the Dark Globe (1946) and Tobey’s Western Town (1944). All these artists both loved the pacific northwest and were keenly aware of the larger world of which it was part. Their work was recognized for being both essentially northwest and far from provincial. Many younger artists around the Pacific Northwest found resonance in how qualities of the region seemed so strongly evident while something universal also glowed in these earlier artists' works. Influences and inspirations traceable to these earlier painters can be seen in work by many contemporary artists. One notable example would be Jay Steensma, who died in 1997. He left numerous moody, misty, "northwesty" paintings-some of them titled with admiring reference to Anderson, Tobey, Graves, and Helmi Juvonen. While Tobey influenced the Japanese artist, Kenjiro Nomura, the work of Nomura and Kamekichi Tokita was said to "foreshadow characteristics of the Northwest School".[6] The works of artists such as photographer Mary Randlett and sculptor Tony Angell relate strongly to the Northwest School. Angell’s sculpture often incorporates birds, as did Washington’s, Gilkey’s and McCracken’s work. The flowing and silhouette style of Angell’s work closely ties it to McCracken’s sculpture. Randlett takes black and white photographs of northwest landscapes that often have wonderfully painterly qualities. William Tappan was born on October 30, 1821, in Manchester, Massachusetts, the home of four generations of the Tappan family whose ancestors had arrived in nearby Newbury from Pately Bridge, Yorkshire, England, in 1632. His great-grandfather, the Reverend Benjamin Tappan, was the pastor of the Manchester church for forty-five years and his grandfather, Colonel Ebenezer Tappan, served in the Revolutionary Army. His father, Ebenezer, Jr., was a storekeeper, ship builder, furniture manufacturer, builder of fire engines, member of the Massachusetts State Legislature, and the colonel of a regiment of militia. William became an artist and an engraver of portraits in mezzotint and worked with the engraver Joseph Andrew in Boston in the early 1840s. While there, he and George G. Smith opened a business for engraving photographs in mezzotint. Somewhat later he found employment in Philadelphia as a draftsman for the federal government. Tappan was also employed by Jean Louis Agassiz to make drawings to illustrate the Harvard professor's books and lectures. In 1848 William Henry Tappan spent nearly six months with the Missouri Mounted Volunteers in present day Nebraska. A civilian, he was invited to accompany the soldiers because of his proven artistic ability. Tappan's instructions during the tour were to make drawings and collections that would illustrate the botanical, zoological, and geographical features of the country. In 1849 Tappan again became a guest of the regiment at the invitation of Secretary of War George W. Crawford. This expedition continued the work of establishing military posts along the overland immigrant routes and among the Indian tribes in Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon. Tappan stayed in Oregon where he was appointed postmaster in Oregon City and was also employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1851 he helped to

Paintings in Cascadia

Columbia River, Cathlamet WA L(1850)

2

James Everett Stuart

1825-1941

lay out the town of St. Helens and remained in that area where he served as a merchant and legislator. He designed the seal of Washington Territory. In April of 1857 Tappan married Margaret Anderson and in 1864 they moved to Colorado to partner with his brother, Lewis, in mercantile businesses in Denver, Golden, and Central City. After a disastrous fire in Central City, Tappan returned to Manchester where he was engaged in surveying and dealing in real estate. He was elected to the state senate for a term in 1885-1886 and was also one of the founders of the Manchester Historical Society. Tappan's wife Margaret died in April of 1867, and in 1881 he married Augusta Wheaton, a Manchester native. William Tappan died in 1907 at the age of eighty-six. He was survived by his wife and a sister. James Everett Stuart was a prolific painter of the west coast, said to have produced over 5,000 western landscape paintings during his lifetime. His work is well-known for its moody, dramatic style, suggestive of the French Barbizon School.

Sunset South of Tacoma (1891)

Born in Bangor, Maine in 1852, Stuart moved to California with his parents at the age of eight and settled on a ranch near Rio Vista. He went on to become a prize student under Virgil Williams and Raymond Dabb Yelland at the California School of Design in the late 1870s. Stuart co-founded the legendary Bohemian Club of San Francisco in 1872 along with several journalists and artists, who created the club for the association of gentlemen connected professionally with literature, art, music, or drama. Among its members were well-known California artists and writers such as: William Keith, Arthur William Best, Giuseppi Leone Cadenasso, Thomas Hill, Granville Redmond Virgil Williams, Samuel Marsden Brookes and Jules Tavernier. The artists and writers gathered regularly at the Russian River in Northern California for a summer encampment, a tradition continued by current Bohemian Club members. The organization also gathered a significant amount of funds for the purchase of a stand of redwoods in Monte Rio, California. This scenic area served as the site of the summer encampment for over a hundred years, and countless artists have drawn inspiration from the natural beauty of the land. In 1879, after graduating from the California School of Design, Stuart settled in The Dalles, Oregon, supporting himself by painting signs for businesses that were rebuilding after a fire had burned down the town. In a reminiscence published in the Rio Vista River News-Herald, Stuart recalled, “During the morning hours on Sundays, I made color paintings direct from nature of the wonderful subjects near the town, and when work was slack would take a camping and sketching trip to some nearby interesting places… and in that manner secured many of my most important subjects while working at commercial painting to earn my daily bread.” Stuart later migrated to Portland, Oregon and became a leading member of the art scene there for several years. His name appears first in a list of the founding members of the Portland Art Club, preceding those of such fine painters as Cleveland Rockwell and Grafton Tyler Brown.

3

Abby Williams Hill

1861-1943

By the early 20th century, Stuart was a highly successful and well-known painter. His paintings are currently in the collections of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the California State Library in Sacramento, University of Southern California, Los Angeles County Museum and the White House. Abby Williams Hill (1861–1943) was a painter, activist, and prolific writer. She produced a remarkable collection of landscape paintings showcasing the grandeur of the American West, as well as a vast archive of letters and journals addressing issues of continuing social and historical interest. Abby Rhoda Williams was born in 1861, in Grinnell, Iowa, a town founded on progressive but strict Christian values. As a young woman, she studied in Chicago, and with William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League in New York. In 1888 she married Frank Hill, a homeopathic doctor. The couple moved to Tacoma the following year, the same year Washington achieved statehood. Soon after Hill gave birth to a son, Romayne. Later the Hills would adopt three daughters. In 1894 Hill began spending weekends and summers on nearby Vashon Island. The time she spent on the island whetted her appetite for the wilderness, and the following year she joined expeditions to Mt. Rainier and Hood Canal. These trips were transformative; they kindled a lifelong passion for hiking, camping, and working en plein air, and led to a brief but successful career as a professional landscape painter for the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads. In addition to her work as a painter, Hill was active in the Congress of Mothers, today’s National Parent Teacher Association. She was a founder and the first president of the Washington state chapter and advocated for services for recent immigrant and other disadvantaged families. Later in her life, Hill became concerned with the threat that commercial and tourist interests posed to the natural environment. She noted that several of the landscapes that she had painted earlier in her career no longer existed in the state in which she had observed them. In response she embarked on a series of paintings of the western National Parks, which she considered her legacy to future generations. She is best known for her commissioned works for the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads, which were exhibited at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 and the Lewis & Clark Exposition in Portland in 1905. The collection is remarkably intact as a result of Hill's agreement with the railroads to trade the right to exhibit and reproduce her works for railway passes for herself and her four children, rather than sell the works outright.

Glacier Peaks During Storm (1903)

4

Paul Morgan Gustin

1886-1974

5

Charles C. McKim

1862-1939

6

Fokko Tadama

1871-1937

7

Helen Logie

1895-1976

Paul Morgan Gustin was a Seattle painter who became internationally known for his paintings of Mt. Rainier and Pacific Northwest landscapes. Born in Vancouver, Washington, he was raised in Denver where he studied with Jean Manheim. He returned to Seattle in 1906 and became a successful local artist. His first national exhibition was in 1913 at the Pennsylvania Academy. He also exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute, Seattle Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery and also in Europe. His work is included in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum and the University of Washington's Henry Art gallery. As a child, Charles C. McKim was strongly influenced by artist Winslow Homer. McKim wrote of his summer camp experiences with Homer in the 1922 Portland Spectator. Eventually McKim went to Boston to study and opened a studio in Portland, Maine. He next lived in New York and later came to Portland, Oregon in 1911. He opened a studio in the Labbe Building at Second and Washington Streets. McKim had one of his first exhibitions at the Portland Press Club in the Elk's Building. Included were scenes of Siletz Bay, Salmon River Bay, Cascade Head, and sketches of sunsets and opalescent mornings. This early show provided an interesting comparison between the Atlantic Coast works he brought with him and his current work. One year after his arrival in Portland, he was instrumental in forming the short-lived Society of Oregon Artists for which he served as the first President. Their mission was: "to seek to interest buyers of works of art of Oregonians and to encourage the work of artists; ... and bring into prominence latent talent." This group enjoyed the participation of prominent artists of the day with a membership of forty-five and four exhibits to their credit before disbanding in 1913. McKim also wrote a column in the Portland Spectator in the 1920s on art and its value in society. McKim spent his summers at Crater Lake or at Yachats on the coast, where he filled many sketch books. His choice of subject was sometimes unusual: the chill of fog which all but obscured the subject matter, sunlight dancing over the violet waters of Crater Lake or the sluggish Columbia Slough portrayed in a romantic way. He said in an interview in 1922 that he was in Oregon now because "he is in love with the scenery." When the snow fell he took his easel outdoors and painted until every flake disappeared; he filled his studio with snow scenes. Oregon scenery is the constant theme of his work. He was an artist of clear and sensitive vision, Oregon's quintessential Impressionist. He signed his work C.C. McKim. [Artist biography reproduced with permission from the authors, Oregon Painters: the First Hundred Years (1859-1959), Ginny Allen and Jody Klevit.] Born illegitimate and bi-racial, orphaned young, half Indonesian, half Dutch, and finally and impact-fully American, Fokko Tadama’s story is as interesting as his body of work. And it varies in the telling (see below) Mentor to the Issei community of painters, he is an important figure in the Northwest School of painting. First steeped in the Dutch tradition of landscape and maritime painting and French impressionism, his time in Seattle turned him towards the American strain of Ashcan realism, of which this painting is a terrific example. Born in Bandar, India to a Dutch father and an Indonesian mother, Tadama received his training at the Academy of Fine Arts, Amsterdam and the Rijks Museum School of Art, in addition to private instruction in Holland. The Tadama family estate at Katwijk aan Zee in Holland was an idyllic setting for the artist and his wife, Tarmine Groenveld (1871-1938), a well-known marine painter. Both artists were very successful and sold numerous paintings of popular Dutch seascapes both in Holland and for the export market. Unfortunately, within a few years of their marriage, Groenveld had to be permanently institutionalized for acute psychological disorders. Distraught, Tadama left his native country and family to begin a new life and emigrated to Seattle, via Paris and New York, around 1910. Arriving with a European exhibition history, he held his first one-man show in Seattle in 1913 at the Seattle Public Library, which was extremely well received by the community. The following year, he started the Fokko Tadama Art School in Seattle that would become an important starting point for many of the city’s better known artists. Tadama was especially influential with Seattle’s Japanese-American artists including painter Kenjiro Nomura and photographer Soichi Sunami. An Impressionist painter, Tadama utilized the direct, spontaneous brushwork associated with impressionism but with a subdued use of color. Fokko remarried a Seattle woman and continued a successful career as painter and teacher until the Great Depression of the 1930’s changed the course of his life and career. With the declining demand for art during this economic crisis, Fokko joined dozens of other needy artists on the W.P.A. Federal Art Projects as an easel painter. Curiously, he began painting Dutch coastal scenes again in the manner that was so successful for him thirty years earlier. In 1937, despondent, economically insecure and in poor health, Fokko Tadama ended his own life in Seattle. Helen A. Loggie (1895–1976) was a nationally recognized artist whose works were largely inspired by her surroundings on Orcas Island. Born in Bellingham, Washington, she built a house on the shores of Eastsound in 1930–31, where she spent summers working on her charming and detailed pencil drawings of the island’s trees, meadows, and surrounding islands. Helen Loggie studied at Smith College and the Art Students League of New York, where she studied under Robert Henri. She toured Europe in 1926-27 where she made an extensive body of sketches and paintings. Soon before returning home to Washington, she met etcher and printer John Taylor Arms, beginning a twenty-five year collaboration. In 1957 she was elected an Academician of the National Academy of Design. “[S]he takes to her art a clarity of perception, an uncompromising honesty, a profundity of feeling, a humility of spirit, and a respect for her medium, that are reflected in everything she does.” —John Taylor Arms, from “Exhibition of Drawings and Etchings by Helen A. Loggie” Kleemann Galleries, New York, N.Y. October, 1938 Helen Loggie’s works are part of the permanent collections at the Western Gallery of Art at Western Washington University, the Whatcom Museum of History and Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art,

Outpost Trees: The Tatoosh Range (1919) Oregon Landscape near Sauvie Island (no dat)

Union Bay, Lake Washington (1910)

San Juan Islands, Orcas Waterfront (1925)

8

Dorothy Dolph Jensen

1895-1977

9

John Carl Ely

1897-1929

10

Paul Horiuchi

1906-1999

the National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, and the British Museum in London. The Lambiel Museum exhibits the largest collection of her pieces in the world. On display are one hundred and forty-two of her original pencil and charcoal drawings, etchings, pastels, and oil paintings. They include work from 1915 to her last published etching, “Hosanna,” in 1960. Also on display is her most famous work, “The King Goblin”—both the original drawing (1936) and the etching (1939). On exhibit also is the stylus and magnifying glass she used to create her world-class etchings. Painter/print-maker Dorothy Dolph Jensen began her study of art at a very young age. Born in Forest Grove, Oregon she was sent to Europe at the age of twelve where she would remain until 1914. While in Europe, she began art studies first in Antwerp with a Monsieur Hanneau and then became a student at the Academie Julian in Paris. It was while attending this school that she first learned how to produce etchings at the age of 13. Returning to the Northwest in 1914, Jensen moved to Seattle but returned to Portland to study at the Portland Art School with Harry Wentz and Sidney Bell. Following her marriage in 1919 to Lloyd Jensen, the artist would remain in Seattle permanently, becoming one of the City's most highly respected artists. Lloyd Jensen himself was a noteworthy craftsman. He produced exceptionally beautiful hand-carved frames not only for his wife but also for most of Seattle and Alaska's most important artists. Having retained and developed her interest in printmaking, Jensen became one of the city's few artists working in intaglio methods in the 1920's and 30's. A founding member of the Women Painters Of Washington in 1930, Dorothy Dolph Jensen was also a charter member of the Northwest Watercolor Society and an early exhibitor and long time member of the Northwest Print-makers organization, which was formed in 1928.
Her exhibition history includes a one-woman show at the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Fine Arts Society, Women Painters of Washington as well as exhibitions in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland and San Francisco. Her work is in the Permanent Collection of the Portland Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum and the Hallie-Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR. "How many years is it necessary for a local sculptor working elsewhere to become an expatriot (sic) sculptor? This is the question brought up in regard to an article in these columns last Sunday on sculptors of the past and present in Seattle. It was pointed out that John Ely, whose tragic death by drowning took place several years ago off the New England coast and meant the loss to American sculpture of one of its most promising figures should be considered a local sculptor. John Ely was originally a Seattle artist, although he made his success in the East and worked largely there. As he was generally considered in the art world as allied wi an American painter and collagist. He was born in Oishi, Japan, and studied art from an early age. After immigrating to the United States in his early teens he spent many years as a railroad worker in the Western U.S. In 1946 he moved to Seattle, Washington, where he eventually switched his focus from painting to collage, and came to be associated with the "Northwest School" of artists. In his mid-forties he was finally able to devote himself to art full-time, his unusual collage style becoming very popular in the 1950s and 60s. He continued creating art at his studio in Seattle until succumbing to Alzheimer'srelated health problems in 1999.[1][2] Today he is best known to the public for his glass mosaic backdrop to the Seattle Center's Mural Amphitheater, but his paintings and collage remain highly prized by collectors, are on permanent display at several museums, and continue to be the subject of special exhibitions at various museums and galleries. Paul Horiuchi was born Chikamasa Horiuchi on April 12, 1906, in the village of Oishi, on the shores of Lake Kawaguchi, near Mount Fuji, in Japan. He was the second son of Daisaku Horiuchi, a cabinetmaker and Kabuki singer, and his wife Yasu. His father departed for the United States when Chikamasa was a few days old, followed by his mother four years later. Chikamasa and his older brother Toshimasa (later known as "Tom") were raised by their grandfather, Tokutaro Horiuchi, an antiques collector.[3] Horiuchi was a runner in his early teens, his best time for the 100-meter dash reputedly tying the Olympic record. He was nominated for Japan's Olympic team, but had to stop running due to an enlarged heart. Under Iketani, a locally prominent artist, Horiuchi studied traditional sumi-e (or ink wash) technique, and won second prize in a nationwide landscape painting competition.[4] When Chikamasa was fourteen his older brother left to join their parents in America, and Chikamasa followed suit two years later, boarding ship for the United States on December 21, 1920. A few days later he arrived in Seattle, where he was greeted by his older cousin Shigetoshi Horiuchi, a trader and collector of Asian art whose connections in Pacific Northwest art circles would later prove helpful to Chikamasa. He then traveled on to meet his family in the busy railroad town of Rock Springs, Wyoming.[5] Although he had never seen his father before, he recognized him immediately by his resemblance to Toshimasa.[6] Daisaku was working for the Union Pacific Railroad as a maintenance foreman in nearby Kanda, Wyoming, and it was there that Chikamasa met his seven- and eight-year-old American-born sisters and three-year-old brother for the first time.[7] Chikamasa began working for Union Pacific with his father. To get around company rules forbidding family members from working on the same gangs, he adopted his mother's maiden name, Kamakura, and was thus known as Chikamasa Kamakura for many years. He also fudged his age, from 15 up to 16, and learned accent-free Spanish from Mexican fellow laborers. By age 17, he was a section foreman.[8] When Horiuchi had been in the U.S. for about a year, his 45-year-old father died of stomach cancer, and his mother returned to Japan with the three younger children shortly afterwards.[9] Chikamasa and Toshimasa were left with very little money to live on as they tried to both support their mother and

Mending Nets (1935)

Young Girl Walking (1923-25)

Self Portrait (1932)

pay off debts which their father had incurred. In 1929 the brothers opened a radio sales and repair shop, but it was soon lost in the Great Depression, and they returned to work on the railroad. Horiuchi painted in his free time, mostly doing landscapes in the sumi-e style, but experimenting with more modern American and European approaches as well. He received some notice in newspapers in Wyoming and Utah.[10] During trips to Seattle to visit his cousin Shigetoshi he met and befriended the painters Kenjiro Nomura and Kamekichi Tokita, who were important influences. He also became friends with Tomatsu Takizaki, a zen master and Kendo instructor who would play an important role in shaping his career. In 1934, during a visit to Seattle, he met and fell in love with Bernadette Suda, who was seven years younger than he. Shigetoshi and Takizaki helped arrange their courtship, and, after Horiuchi converted to Roman Catholicism and changed his first name to 'Paul', they married in Seattle in 1935. On moving back to Rock Springs with her new husband, Bernadette was shocked by life in Union Pacific company housing, which had neither electricity or indoor plumbing, but soon adapted. They had two sons, Paul, Jr., and Jon (a third, Vincent, was born later, in Seattle). In 1937 Horiuchi, who had continued to use 'Kamakura', officially reverted to his real last name.[11] Although conditions were rough in Wyoming, Horiuchi was making good money, was able to purchase a new car, made regular trips to visit friends and family in Seattle, and continued to develop his painting skills, often using his wife and children as subject matter. In 1938, paintings of his were included in Annual Exhibitions at the Oakland Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Seattle Art Museum.[12] The advent of the Second World War brought extreme hardship for the Horiuchis. They lived far enough inland that they were not subject to forced relocation, but all Japanese were immediately fired by Union Pacific and evicted from company housing. People of Japanese ancestry were often physically threatened, and denied decent work and housing. The Horiuchis were forced to live in a homemade trailer much of the time, while Paul worked various temporary, menial jobs. Unable to carry it with them, and fearing it would get them in trouble with the authorities, Horiuchi burned his collection of old Japanese books and prints;[13] a collection of twenty-five of his best paintings, left with a friend, was destroyed in a flood. At one point the family applied for placement in a relocation camp (a not uncommon occurrence for desperate Japanese-Americans seeking shelter and food), but were denied. In 1944 the almost 40-year-old Horiuchi was offered a job as an apprentice auto repairman in Spokane, Washington, and from there his luck began to change. With the war over, Horiuchi and his family moved to Seattle, where he opened Paul's Body and Fender Shop in the city's bustling International District. The business was a success. At the same time, Horiuchi's career as an artist began to take off. In 1947 he won first prize in oil painting at the Western Washington Fair, which at that time was a well-respected exhibition juried by major figures from the West Coast art world, and in 1948 his painting Boat House was shown in the Seattle Art Museum's 34th Northwest Annual Exhibition. He also began receiving the attention of critics and journalists. In 1950 Horiuchi suffered a fall from a ladder in which he severely injured his left wrist, and was unable to work for several months. As the Horiuchis reached financial desperation, a family friend asked if he could try selling some of Paul's paintings. To Horiuchi's surprise, the friend quickly sold four of his works for a considerable amount of money. Horiuchi closed his auto repair shop and opened Tozai ("East-West") Art, an antique shop which also served as his studio and gallery, and as a meeting place for artists.[14] In 1953, a change in the law allowed Horiuchi to become a U.S. citizen.[15] Through Takizaki he met and became close friends with the painter Mark Tobey,[16] which led Horiuchi to re-examine his own approach to art. He became increasingly interested in collage, and began experimenting with the fusion of elements of traditional Japanese collage with more modern techniques, styles, and materials. At its most basic level he was combining 'Eastern' shikishi design with 'Western' abstract expressionism, but injecting it with a unique energy, perhaps born of Horiuchi's numerous personal ups and downs and dislocations. He gradually gained command of this new style, and, in the late 1950s, his work became increasingly popular. On May 5, 1957 Horiuchi's first solo show opened at the Zoë Dusanne Gallery in Seattle.[17] It was a spectacular success, with twenty-two out of twenty-five paintings quickly sold. The following year the first solo museum exhibition of his work was held at the Seattle Art Museum, and he gained his first broad exposure outside the Northwest when some of his pieces were chosen for the Rome-New York Art Foundation Exhibit, in New York and Rome. His annual shows at Seattle's Woodside/Braseth Gallery became major events; on one occasion, all of Horiuchi's works sold before the show even opened to the public - much to his irritation.[18] His collages were shown at the Carnegie Art International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1961, and again in 1964. In 1962, when Seattle hosted the Century 21 World's Fair, Horiuchi received a commission to create a huge (17' x 60') outdoor mural which would serve as the backdrop for an amphitheater at the Seattle Center. Today, the Mural Amphitheater's glass mosaic backdrop remains his most popularly known work. In 1966 Paul and Bernadette moved into a house designed for them by architect Gregory Saito. It featured a spacious basement studio overlooking Seattle's Rainier Beach neighborhood. Paul indulged in his love of expensive bonsai trees, while Bernadette continued her 22-year career at the International Branch of Seattle First National Bank. Horiuchi's work was widely praised by critics. Said Michiaki Kawakita, curator in chief of Japan's National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo: "He is fast approaching the complete mastery of his new technique [...] His work is of the finest produced today".[19] Final years[edit] In his later years Horiuchi suffered from stomach cancer - which had killed his father - but surgery to eradicate it was successful. Later, however, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and died of complications from the disease in August, 1999.

11, 22

Mark Tobey

1890-1976)

See Image 22

12

Kamekichi Tokita

1897-1948

A Japanese American painter and diarist. He immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1919, and lived in Seattle, Washington's Japantown/Nihonmachi district (now the International District). He was a prominent figure in the Pacific Northwest art world of the 1930s, with paintings regularly included in major exhibitions.[1] During World War II, Tokita and his family were forced to move to the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho. His detailed, deeply expressive diary and sketches he made there were later published and recognized as important records of the Japanese American wartime experience. Tokita was born July 16, 1897, in the coastal city of Shizuoka, Shizuoka Prefecture,[1] to Juhei Tokita and Shin Kato Tokita. He had an older brother, Wahei, and three younger sisters. His father, Juhei, owned a soy sauce manufacturing business and ran a family-owned dry tea shop.[2] As in many middleclass families of the Meiji Era, great importance was placed on both traditional Japanese values and modern, Western-style education.[3] Tokita showed an interest in art from an early age, but was expected to work in the family business. After graduating from high school in 1915 his father sent him to China (the exact location is unrecorded) to work as a tea salesman, but he instead spent much of his two years there studying calligraphy and traditional ink painting under a Chinese teacher. Exasperated by his son's growing rebelliousness, Tokita's father planned to send him to work with business associates in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. Tokita sailed the Yokohama-Seattle line aboard the Suwa Maru, arriving in Seattle, Washington on December 2, 1919. He was greeted by his brother Wahei, who had been living and working in Seattle for several years. Enamored of the city and its thriving Japantown district, Tokita did not continue on to Chicago.[4] Little detail is known of Tokita's early years in Seattle. His brother returned to Japan about a year after Tokita's arrival. Around the same time, he met Kenjiro Nomura, a fellow Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) painter who became his close friend and business partner, and who introduced him to oil painting. Tokita began working as a sign painter, a trade in which his skill at calligraphy proved useful.[4] Both Seattle's and Nihonmachi's arts communities were vibrant and growing quickly in the 1920s, and—despite some hostility toward Japanese immigrants in the larger community[5]— ties were formed between the two. The city's mainstream art institutions regularly exhibited works by Japanese American artists, while celebrated artists such as Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Mark Tobey would become known for the inspiration of Japan's and Asia's artists, poets, and philosophers.[6][7] While his skill as a sign painter was a source of income, his oil paintings headed in a very different direction. He painted scenes of the world around him—houses, apartment buildings, stores, streets, bridges, the waterfront—using bold outlines and subtle valuation of earthen tones. With his friend Nomura and others he at times ventured into the countryside to paint rural scenes, but most of his still-extant paintings show urban scenes of the city where he lived and worked. Because of his vernacular subject matter and realist approach he came to be associated with the American Scene painters, but unlike many of them he rarely painted human forms.[8] There are indications Tokita's work was displayed as early as 1924 in Japantown, but his first real notice came in 1928, when his painting Yeslerway was included in the First Northwest Independent Salon.[9] That same year, he became Kenjiro Nomura's partner at the Noto Sign Co., whose building at Sixth and Main, in the heart of Japantown, served as their workshop, home, studio, and salon. There they communed with Japanese American artists such as George Tsutakawa, Paul Horiuchi, and Takuichi Fujii.[10] The impact of the Great Depression, which began the following year, was muted at first. Still-solvent backers allowed the arts to continue to thrive in Seattle. After a competitor opted to close shop and return to Japan, Noto became the only sign company serving the Asian community.[1 Tokita's period of greatest activity and acclaim lasted from about 1929 to 1936. His work appeared regularly in Annual Exhibitions in Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland,[1] and was displayed in solo shows. He was encouraged and supported by, among others, the Seattle Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, and artist/critic Kenneth Callahan, who described Tokita as "the leader of the Japanese painters in Seattle".[11] On January 24, 1932, Tokita married Haruko Suzuki, who, though ten years younger than he, had also immigrated to the U.S. in 1919. Tokita moved out of the Noto Sign Co. building. Starting with a son born in 1934, the couple would have eight children over the next twelve years. In 1935, at Callahan's urging, Tokita joined the Group of Twelve, a progressive artists' collective which held several successful exhibitions. In 1936 his work appeared in four Group of Twelve shows, the 22nd Northwest Annual at the Seattle Art Museum, and the First National Exhibition of American Art at the Rockefeller Center Gallery in New York.[12] Despite his successes, the pressures of the Great Depression were unavoidable. Tokita created six oil paintings for the federal Public Works of Art Program, one of which was shown in the PWAP's 1934 National Exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[12] In 1936, slow business forced Tokita and Nomura to close down their sign painting shop. Tokita then became manager/operator of the Cadillac Hotel at Second and Jackson streets, just outside Japantown, while continuing as a freelance sign painter. With two time-consuming jobs and a growing family, his fine art production dropped off quickly. Tokita and his family lived in cramped quarters at the hotel, but managed to weather the Great Depression fairly well. Tokita bought a car, and took his kids on weekend trips to parks and the countryside. He competed in kyudo (ritualized traditional archery) tournaments and was an active participant in community events and celebrations. With his family he was a strict disciplinarian and traditionalist who allowed only Japanese to be spoken at home, but

Seattle in the Snow (1930) Untitled (1950) Untitled (1935)

13

Jacob Elshin

1892-1976

14

Ernest Norling

1892-1974

15

Kenjiro Nomura

1896-1956

was relaxed and good-humored in larger settings. By the late 1930s, he appears to have ceased painting fine art almost entirely.[13] Although their children were Nisei, and therefore U.S. citizens, Tokita and his wife, as Issei, were legally barred from becoming citizens,[14] and were classified as resident aliens. On December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor.[15] A few weeks later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to declare the West Coast a military zone from which all persons of Japanese descent, including Nisei, were to be removed.[16] After months of uncertainty, the Tokitas had to sell their hotel business and many of their belongings. They spent the summer of 1942 crowded into the Puyallup Assembly Center (a converted fairgrounds near Seattle), and were then transported to the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho, where they lived for the next three years. Tokita's young son Shokichi (b. 1933) later recalled that there were "barbed wires all around the camp... [and] towers on all three sides of the camp, and soldiers... guarding us all day and night".[17] Tokita worked as a maintenance man and sign painter in the camp. Finally having time, he began sketching and painting again, creating oil-on-masonite works in a contemporary style, and also pencil sketches in traditional Japanese style. He, Kenjiro Nomura, and Takuichi Fujii were featured in art shows at the camp.[18] Tokita began keeping a diary on December 7, 1941, and the entries are often surprising, revealing the complexity of the times for an Issei man. More so than any other memoirist, he captures the uncertainty of the five months between Pearl Harbor and the beginning of the forced relocation, in which the Nikkei were buffeted by physical and legal threats, contradictory orders, rumors, and intense anxiety. Tokita, though no threat to the security of his adopted country, is understanding of Japan's war aims, proud of its military prowess, dismissive of both Axis and Allied propaganda, and thankful for the humane actions of individual whites. He reveals the rivalry — amplified by the close quarters of the camps — between older, conservative Issei and brash, energetic Nisei. He resents the suffering of his family in temperatures ranging from near zero to over a hundred, but appreciates the beauty of the surrounding landscape, a desert moonrise leaving him awestruck.[19] His diaries were translated from old-style Japanese and first published in 2011. With the war's end in 1945, the Tokitas, now with seven children, rather hesitantly moved back to Seattle. For all the hardship and primitive, crowded conditions at Minidoka, it had, after three years, become their home — free of charge, in a stable, known community. Back in Seattle, they found that even the name 'Japantown' had generally been dropped in favor of 'Chinatown'.[20] Unable to find housing, an old family friend, Father Leopold Tibesar, arranged for them to live with several other returnee families in a classroom of the local Japanese language school. There the family lived for two years, with communal kitchen and bathrooms, sleeping on army cots, just as they had at Minidoka. Tokita resumed work as a sign painter, but, suffering from undiagnosed diabetes, appeared to have lost some of his former drive.[19] Their eighth child, a daughter, was born in 1946, and the following year, mainly through Haruko's effort, they purchased operation and management of the New Lucky Hotel in Chinatown. It was essentially a flophouse in dilapidated condition, but they set to work repairing and upgrading it. In 1948, Tokita was hospitalized with blindness, kidney failure, and numbness of limbs - all symptoms of advanced diabetes. He eventually returned home, but on October 7, at age 51, he had a heart attack and died.[1 was a Russian American artist. Born in Russia, he served as an officer in the Imperial Russian Army, and may have been a student at the St. Petersburg Academy. He arrived in Seattle in 1923 where he was described as a "straight pictorialist".[1] His art was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, where he worked with Mark Tobey, Helmi Juvonen, and others.[2] He also provided services to the U.S. Treasury Department.[3] Elshin socialized with other artists at the Chinese Art Club. Painter and Illustrator who worked in oil, watercolor and tempera doing portraits, murals, port scenes and religious iconography. He was the son of a pre-revolutionary Russian Army General. He studied at the Nicholas Calvary School and the Russian Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg and served in the White Russian Army. Between the time he came to the U.S., he worked as a cartoonist for the North China Daily News in Shanghai. He moved to Seattle in 1923. He was a member of Puget Sound Group of Northwest Men Painters, Washingto Interview: http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-ernest-ralph-norling-13113#transcript Born Pasco, WA on Sept. 26, 1892. Norling studied at Whitman College and the AIC. By 1937 he was a resident of Los Angeles where he authored Perspective Made Easy (MacMillan, 1939). By 1949 he had returned to Washington where he remained until his demise in Seattle on March 23, 1974. He was the brother of artist Lily N. Hardwick. His work includes oils, watercolors, dry points, woodcuts, pen-and-ink drawings, and lithographs. Exh: SFAA, 1932; Seattle Museum, 1934-35; Painters & Sculptors of LA, 1937. In: Prosser (WA) Post Office; Bremerton (WA) Post Office; White House (Washington, DC); Seattle Museum. a Japanese American painter. Immigrating to the United States from Japan as a boy, he became a well-known artist in the Pacific Northwest in the 1920s and 30s. In 1942, during the Second World War, Nomura and his family were incarcerated in the Minidoka Relocation Center. Sketches and paintings he made there over the next three years continue to be exhibited as an important record of the Japanese-American wartime experience.

Mural Study depicting construction of Grand Coulee Dam (1938)

Untitled (1938)

Untitled (1936)

16

Vanessa Helder

1904-1968

Nomura eventually moved into abstract painting. He died in Seattle, Washington, in 1956. Kenjiro Nomura was born in 1896 in Gifu, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. In 1907 his family immigrated to the United States, settling in Tacoma, Washington. When he was sixteen his parents returned to Japan; Kenjiro opted to stay in the U.S. In 1916 Nomura moved to Seattle, working for a shopkeeper in the city's bustling Japantown / Nihonmachi neighborhood (later known as the International District). Within a year he began working as an apprentice sign painter (most likely with Burgira Hirayama, the only known professional sign painter in Japantown at that time), and began taking lessons in the studio of Fokko Tadama, a prominent art teacher who instructed Nomura in the basic techniques of Western Art. A Dutch-Indonesian immigrant himself, Tadama often worked with Japanese-American students.[1] In 1922, after five years of study with Tadama, Nomura had some of his paintings selected by the Seattle Fine Art Society for inclusion in its Annual Exhibition of the Artists of the Pacific Northwest. The same year he and a friend, Show Toda, opened a sign painting business in Japantown. The following year they moved it to Sixth Ave. and Main St., in the heart of Nihonmachi, where it would remain for the next thirteen years. Combining their names, they called it Noto Sign Co.[2] It soon became a successful business and a studio and hang-out for artists, as well as Nomura and Toda's home. Notable Nikkei artists who worked and socialized there at various times included Takuichi Fujii, George Tsutakawa, Paul Horiuchi, and Kamekichi Tokita.[3] After Toda got married and moved on in 1928, Tokita took his place as Nomura's business partner. The two men, who had met around 1921, would become inextricably linked, their very different ways of painting similar subjects providing contrast and context to each other's work. Long after their deaths their paintings would continue to be exhibited side by side. In the 1920s Seattle's arts community was growing with an energy that continued even through the early years of the Great Depression. Nomura and his peers regularly appeared in the Seattle Art Institute's 'Northwest Annuals', and when the Seattle Art Museum opened in 1933, its first solo exhibition was of Nomura's work (both SAI and SAM, under the directorship of Dr. Richard Fuller, were descendants of the Seattle Fine Art Society). His work was also shown at the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery, and, as his reputation spread, at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.[4] Nomura married in 1928, at which time he moved out of the Noto building.[5] He and his wife Fumiko had a son, George, in 1930.[6] In 1935 Nomura was invited to join the Group of Twelve, a cooperative gathering of progressive artists including Kenneth Callahan and Ambrose Patterson. The Group's exhibitions proved popular, and several were held over the next couple of years.[7] Despite his successes as an artist, the deepening Depression was taking its toll. In 1933 he was happy to be paid $38.25 a week to produce several paintings for the federal Public Works of Art Project, some of which were shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 1936, lack of business forced Nomura to close down Noto Sign Co.; he and Fumiko were eventually able to reestablish themselves by managing a dry-cleaning business in Seattle's University District.[8] Japanese immigrants in general were subject to discriminatory U.S. laws which barred them from owning property or becoming naturalized citizens.[9] Racist groups periodically began campaigns for the removal of the so-called "Yellow Peril".[10] The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, led to intense suspicion of disloyalty and even sabotage on the part of Japanese-Americans. Executive Order 9066 enabled the U.S. military to remove all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast,[11] including the Nisei, native-born U.S. citizens who in some cases spoke little or no Japanese. They were to be placed in relocation centers - for all intents and purposes, internment camps - far inland. On April 12, 1942, Kenjiro Nomura and his family were transported to the Puyallup Assembly Center, where they were held for three months. They were then moved to the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho, where they were held for three years.[12] Nomura worked as a sign painter in the camp, which allowed him access to paint and brushes. Painting or sketching on whatever materials were available, he created a moving visual record of life in detention. Very few of his internment camp paintings utilized the blended, dark colors which gave a heavy tone to much of his previous work. Some of the works are as small as 5" by 8". One is rendered in crayon on construction paper. Although straightforward and representational, the subjects he chose give a greater insight to what internment was like. The Main Gate, with the Puyallup Fair's main gate building in the background, shows the fenced-off area and shed where visitors from the outside world could meet with the camp's residents. A military policeman, gun at his side, can be seen leaning against the visiting area's back fence. Guard Tower, painted during the winter of 1942-'43, shows a dark and ominous winter sky and a plane of snowy ground broken by a line of barbed wire fence. The Laundry and Sanitation Building, one of the few paintings to feature any people, shows a lone woman with a basket walking to the laundry building in a scene heavy with dull browns and greens.[13] When the Nomuras returned to Seattle after the war, they had trouble finding work, and Nomura's ailing wife committed suicide in 1946. Nomura did not paint until 1947, when another local Japanese artist, Paul Horiuchi, helped him to recover from his losses and return to art.[14] His experiments with abstraction attracted considerable interest, including exhibition at Seattle's Zoë Dusanne Gallery.[15] 16] Nomura died in Seattle in 1956.[ Z. Vanessa Helder was born in Lynden, WA and lived in Seattle and Spokane until relocating permanently to Los Angeles in 1943. She studied at the University of Washington and at the Art Students League in New York with Frank Vincent DuMond, George Picken and Robert Brackman.
In 1939, Helder was on staff at the Spokane Arts Center under the sponsorship of the Washington State W.P.A. teaching watercolor, oil painting and lithography. While there, she executed a series of Precisionist watercolors depicting the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam and its environs for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. 
Helder first gained national attention in 1936 having her work accepted in the American Watercolor Society's exhibition in New York. Her

Edmund Giles Tennant (1939)

17

Yvonne Twining Humber

1907-2004

18

Walter Isaacs

1886-1964

remarkable ability was noticed by Maynard Walker who began representing her at his prestigious New York gallery, which at the time carried some of America's finest artists.
A major accomplishment for the artist was her inclusion in the "Realists and Magic Realists" exhibition at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York in 1943 where she exhibited with major artists such as Edward Hopper.
In addition, she also exhibited at the Whitney & Metropolitan Museums, Oakland, Denver and Seattle Art Museums. She had a one-person exhibition at SAM in 1939. Vanessa Helder was a member of Women Painters of Washington, the National Association of Women Artists and the American and California Watercolor Societies. A nationally prominent painter of the "American Scene," Yvonne Twining Humber's career has spanned eight decades of critically acclaimed work.
The artist was born in New York City and raised in Europe and New England where she received her first art instruction at South Egremont, MA. She first studied with neighbors Charles and Katherine Almond Hulbert, well-known American Impressionists. She then studied at the National Academy of Design in NY from 1925 to 1931, the Art Students League, 1928-1931, and with Charles Hawthorne. In 1933-34, she won two consecutive Tiffany Foundation Fellowships at Oyster Bay, Long Island, NY From 1935 to 1943 she was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as an easel painter in Boston, MA. It was during her period on the WPA that she established a national reputation for her remarkable urban and rural landscapes. Her works were often singled out by critics who praised her unique, highly refined paintings and they were often reproduced in newspapers and art publications of the period. Following her 1943 marriage to Irving Humber, the artist relocated to Seattle where Mr. Humber was a local businessman. She quickly established herself in Seattle's art community, bringing with her an impressive East Coast reputation and a hard-edged urban realism that was not commonplace in the Northwest. She won numerous local awards and had two of her paintings purchased by the Seattle Art Museum for their permanent collection after a very successful one-woman show there in 1946. That same year she won first prize in painting in a national competition at the Smithsonian Institute. She was one of the few Seattle painters to have her work accepted in important national exhibitions during the 1940's, often depicting Seattle city scenes and northwest landscapes in her inimitable style. She taught locally for many years and was a member of many local arts organizations. She was a Life Member of WPW and served as President in 1948. Isaacs was raised on an Illinois farm, but other than the fact that he attended college somewhere, I have no information about what he did from the time he left the farm until he enrolled at Chicago's Art Institute in 1914 when he was about 28 years old. He then went on to teach at what is now Northern Colorado University in Greeley, but left to study in France in 1920. In 1923 he was hired as art professor at the University of Washington and headed the art department until his 1954 retirement. While at Washington he continued to travel to Europe in order to experience what was still the world's leading art. It seems that Isaacs was never truly avant-garde. In fact, his work seems to lag about ten or 15 years behind what passed for cutting-edge during the confused decades from the start of the Great Was until the end of World War 2. For instance, note that he seems to have avoided Surrealism, the most prominent movement of the 1930s, and that he failed to surrender to pure abstraction, if the images in the exhibit are any guide.

Demolition (1948)

Untitled (1935)

Nevertheless, his paintings are influenced by modernism. Shapes are simplified and the appearances feature flatness, not depth. Isaacs, who was dean for 33 years, broke through to his own symbolic figure groups once he retired at age 70 in 1956. His greatest works, including Untitled (c.1957), were his last ones, tiny animated still lifes which seem as fresh and unfinished-looking as the day he dashed them off — 60 years after he exhibited with Picasso in Paris. His is an art that repays scrutiny with pleasure and joy. 19

Elizabeth A. Cooper

1877-1936

Elizabeth Cooper was a highly regarded Modernist painter in Seattle during the 1920’s and 30’s. An early member of Women Painters of Washington, she exhibited with the organization as well as the Northwest Annuals at the Seattle Art Institute and the Seattle Art Museum. She was born in Nottingham, England and after moving to the U.S., attended the Mark Hopkins Art Institute in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute). After moving to Seattle in the early 1920’s, she attended the University of Washington where she studied with Walter Isaacs, Eugenie Worman and others. Cooper was a member of the prominent “Group of Twelve”, a group of Modernist artists in Seattle that included some of the major regional painters of the period (Morris Graves, Ambrose Patterson and Kenneth Callahan). She is one of the last of this group to be studied and re-discovered. 
She assimilated modern movements in art, the European Post-Impressionists, Cubists and the German Expressionists within her work and produced some of the most daring and progressive regional art of her period. In Cooper’s own words,…”Aims: To interpret rather than represent, to achieve good composition, that is, fine arrangement of line, mass and color, irrespective of subject matter or emotional appeal. To stimulate in others, appreciation and understanding of the aims of modern painters, who, by individual technique, endeavor to interpret life and to communicate their aesthetic experience..” Cooper, like so many women artists, had the responsibility of raising her two children and balanced her family life with creating art. In middle age, she created an interesting body of work that was cut short by her untimely death in 1936. “…Art creation is not the exclusive domain of youth. Middle age

Self Portrait (1933)

20

Margaret Gove Camfferman

1881-1964

21

Peter M. Camfferman

1890-1957

22, 11

Mark Tobey— see 11

and old age find in creative art a wellspring of eternal youth. Renoir in his eighties, did his best work. Art, like mercy, is twice blessed; it blesseth him who gives and him who takes..” Margaret Camfferman, along with her husband, Peter Camfferman (1890-1957) were among the earliest Modernist painters in the Northwest. Born in Rochester, Minnesota, Camfferman studied at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts (where she met her husband), the New York School of Applied Arts & Design and with Robert Henri in NY and with Andre Lhote in Paris. In 1914 she married and in 1915 they moved to Langley, Whidbey Island in Washington State. Margaret was an active exhibitor with the Northwest Annuals since the early 1920’s and for many years at the Seattle Art Museum after it opened in 1933. Camfferman ‘s work was in the manner of her master, Henri and followed in the manner of the Post-Impressionists. After studying with Lhote in Paris in 1932, her work took on influences of Cubism and became more experimental. At Langley, she and Peter built their home and included additional cabins for visiting artists and instructors. Their home was called “Brachenwood” and they offered classes. During 1925-26, the Camfferman’s lived in New York City but returned to live permanently in Langley. The Camfferman’s became part of Seattle’s Group of Twelve and were very highly regarded within the regional art community. Like many women of her era, Margaret chose to focus attention on her husband’s career as a painter and was dedicated to his work even though she was 9 years his senior and had considerably more talent and experience in their early years together. Margaret worked with the Public Works of Art Project during the Depression as an easel painter and had a solo exhibiton at the Seattle Art Museum in 1935. Besides local exhibitons, Margaret exhibited in San Francisco at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibiton, the San Francisco Art Museum and the Palace of the Legion of Honor. She also exhibited with the Smithsonian Travelling exhibitions from the 1920’s through 1956. A landscape painter, etcher and art educator, Peter Camfferman was born in The Hague, Holland and at age twelve, emigrated to America. He studied with Andre Lhote at the Lhote Atelier in Paris and at the Minneapolis School of Fine Art where he met his future wife, Margaret Gove Camfferman. The couple married in 1914, and the following year moved to Langley, Washington on Whidbey Island where they built a home they called Brackenwood. They did all of the work by hand including the making of furniture out of driftwood they gathered. The site included cabins for visiting artists and became known as the Brackenwood Art Colony. They held art classes on their property, and Peter was a teacher at the Helen an American painter. His densely structured compositions, inspired by Asian calligraphy, resemble Abstract expressionism,[1][2] although the motives for his compositions differ philosophically from most Abstract Expressionist painters. His work was widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and William Cumming, Tobey was a founder of the Northwest School. Senior in age and experience, he had a strong influence on the others; friend and mentor, Tobey shared their interest in philosophy and Eastern religions. Similar to others of the Northwest School, Tobey was mostly self-taught after early studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. Tobey was an incessant traveler, visiting Mexico, Europe, Palestine, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, China and Japan. After converting to the Bahá'í Faith, it became an important part of his life. Whether Tobey's all-over paintings, marked by oriental brushwork and calligraphic strokes, were an influencer on Jackson Pollock's drip paintings has been left unanswered. Born in Centerville, Wisconsin, Tobey lived in the Seattle, Washington area for most of his life before moving to Basel, Switzerland in the early 1960s with his companion, Pehr Hallsten; Tobey died there in 1976. Tobey was the youngest of four children in the Congregationalist family. His parents were George Tobey, a carpenter and house builder, and Emma Cleveland Tobey. The father carved animals from stone and sometimes drew animals for young Mark to cut out with scissors. In 1893, the family settled in Chicago.[3] He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1906 to 1908, but, like others of the Northwest School, was mostly self-taught. In 1911, he moved to New York City where he worked as a fashion illustrator for McCall's. His first one-man show was held at Knoedler & Company in lower Manhattan, in 1917. The following year, Tobey came in contact with New York portrait artist and Bahá'í Juliet Thompson—an associate of Khalil Gibran—and posed for her. During the session, Tobey read some Bahá'í literature and accepted an invitation to Green Acre where he converted to the Bahá'í faith.[4] His conversion led him to explore the representation of the spiritual in art.[5] In the following years, Tobey delved into works of Arabian literature and teachings of East Asian philosophy. Tobey's arrival in Seattle in 1922 was in part an effort for a new start following a marriage and quick divorce. When his ex-wife found Tobey's address, she sent him a box of his clothes topped with a copy of Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed.[6] In the following year, Tobey met Teng Kuei, a Chinese painter and student at the University of Washington, who introduced Tobey to Eastern penmanship, beginning Tobey’s exploration of Chinese calligraphy. The beginning of his lifelong travels occurred in 1925 when he left for Europe, settling in Paris where Tobey met Gertrude Stein.[6] He spent a winter at Châteaudun, and also traveled to Barcelona and Greece. In Constantinople, Beirut and Haifa, he studied Arab and Persian writing. Upon returning to Seattle in 1927, Tobey shared a studio in a house near the Cornish School (with which he was intermittently associated)[7] with the teenage artist, Robert Bruce Inverarity, who was 20 years younger. Inspired by Inverarity's high-school project, Tobey developed interest in threedimensional form and carved some 100 pieces of soap sculpture. The next year, Tobey co-founded the Free and Creative Art School in Seattle with Edgar Ames, and in autumn, he taught an advanced art course at Emily Carr's Victoria studio.[8] In 1929, he participated in a show that marked a change in his life: a solo exhibition at Romany Marie's Cafe Gallery in New York. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., then a curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), saw the show and selected several pictures from it for inclusion in MoMA's 1930 exhibition: Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans. In 1931, Tobey became a resident artist of the Elmhurst Progressive School while teaching at Dartington Hall in Devon and

Untitled (1932)

Untitled (1941)

23

Kenneth Callahan

1905-1986

painting frescoes for the school. He became a close friend of Bernard Leach, who was also on the faculty. Introduced by Tobey to the Bahá'í Faith, Leach became a convert. During his stay in Devon, Tobey found time to travel to Mexico (1931), Europe, and Palestine (1932). In 1934, Tobey and Leach traveled together through France and Italy, then sailed from Naples to Hong Kong and Shanghai, where they parted company. Leach went on to Japan, while Tobey remained in Shanghai visiting his old friend, Teng Kuei, before departing for Japan. Japanese authorities confiscated and destroyed an edition of 31 drawings on wet paper that Tobey had brought with him from England to be published in Japan. No explanation for their destruction has been noted; possibly they considered his sketches of nude men pornographic. In early summer, he studied Hai-Ku poetry and calligraphy at a Zen monastery outside Kyoto before returning to Seattle in autumn. Tobey's first solo exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum occurred in 1935; he also traveled to New York, Washington, D.C., Alberta, Canada, as well as Haifa for a Bahá'í pilgrimage. Sometime in November or December, while working at night at Dartington Hall and listening to the horses breathe in the field outside his window, he painted a series of three paintings, ’’Broadway’’, ‘’Welcome Hero’’, and ‘’Broadway Norm’’, in the style that would become known as "white writing" (an interlacing of fine white lines). Tobey expected to return to teaching in England in 1938, but the mounting tensions of war building in Europe kept him in the US. Instead, he began to work on the Federal Art Project, under the supervision of Inverarity. In June 1939, when Tobey attended a Bahá'í summer program and overstayed his allotted vacation time, Inverarity dropped him from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. Tobey met the Swedish scholar, Pehr Hallsten (died 1965, Basel), in Ballard,[9] in 1939 and they became companions, living together from 1940.[10] By 1942, Tobey's process of abstractionism was accompanied by a new calligraphic experiment. Marian Willard of the Willard Gallery in New York had seen some of Tobey's WPA paintings and gave him a show in 1944, which was considered to be a major success. In 1945, he gave a solo exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, and the Arts Club of Chicago held solo shows of his work in 1940 and 1946. He studied the piano and the theory of music with Lockrem Johnson, and, when Johnson was away, with Wesley Wehr, who was introduced to Tobey in 1949 by their pianist friend Berthe Poncy Jacobson. Wehr, an undergraduate at the time, happily accepted the opportunity to serve as a stand-in music composition tutor for Tobey and over time became friends with him and his circle of artists, becoming a painter himself, as well as a chronicler of the group. Tobey showed at New York's Whitney Museum in 1951. He also spent three months as guest critic of graduate students’ work at Yale University on the invitation of Josef Albers and had his first retrospective show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. In 1952, the film “Tobey, Mark: Artist” debuted in the Venice and Edinburgh film festivals. Acknowledging "academic responsibility" Hallsten enrolled in graduate school at the University of Washington's department of Scandinavian languages and literature in the early 1950s and, after receiving his master's degree,[10] Tobey began referring to him by the honorific, Professor.[11] On September 28, 1953, Life magazine published an article on Tobey, Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, and Morris Graves entitled "Mystic Painters of the Northwest" which placed them in the national limelight.[12] The four were considered founders of the Northwest School.[13] He held a solo show at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris in 1955, and traveled to Basel and Bern. He began his ink wash paintings two years later. In 1958, he became the second American, after James Abbott McNeill Whistler, to win the International Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale. Tobey and Hallsten emigrated to Basel, Switzerland in the early 1960s.[14] Tobey, who had been an incessant traveler in earlier years,(Etulain 1996, p. 134) concentrated on his art, while Hallsten felt restless and traveled through Europe, returning to Basel.[14] In 1960, Tobey participated in the Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession, and in the following year, he became the first American painter to exhibit at the Pavillon de Marsan in Paris. Solo exhibits occurred at MoMa in 1962, and at the Stedelijk Museum in 1966, the same year that he visited the Bahá'í World Center in Haifa. In 1967, he showed again at the Willard Gallery, and held a Retrospective show at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts the following year. Another major retrospective of the artist’s work took place at the Smithsonian's National Collection of Fine Arts in 1974. Tobey died in Basel in 1976.[15] American painter and muralist who served as a catalyst for Northwest artists in the mid-20th century through his own painting, his work as assistant director and curator at the Seattle Art Museum, and his writings about contemporary art. Born in Eastern Washington and largely self-taught as an artist, Callahan was committed to an art that went beyond the merely illustrative. He enrolled at the University of Washington in 1924 but did not stay long. He traveled widely, absorbing influences from the different countries and cultures he experienced. His talent was recognized early; his work was included in the first Whitney Biennial exhibition in 1933 and he went on to a distinguished painting career. Callahan is identified as one of the Northwest Mystics along with Guy Anderson, Morris Graves, and Mark Tobey - who shared a muted palette and strong interest in Asian aesthetics. Kenneth Callahan was born in Spokane, Washington, on October 30, 1905, the fifth of seven children of John and Martha Ann Cross Callahan. He spent his growing years in the small town of Glasgow, Montana. Encouraged by his mother, he began painting watercolors at age seven.[2]In 1918 he moved with his family to Raymond, Washington, then two years later to Seattle, where he took art classes at Broadway High School. Both his parents died while he was still a teenager.[3] Callahan enrolled in the University of Washington, but left after two months. Moving to San Francisco, he did illustrations for a children's magazine, and, while living in low-rent apartments with other artists, had his first exposure to contemporary abstract art.[3]At that time he was painting in a realist style inspired by Thomas Hart Benton and the artists of the Ashcan School, but he was deeply impressed by the originality of Klee, Kandinsky, and Feininger. He later told journalist Deloris Tarzan Ament, "It was the first time it occurred to me that there could be good art that I didn't like."[2] In 1926 Callahan had his first one-man show at San Francisco's Schwabacher-Frey Gallery; the following year he began his world travels as a ship's steward, winding up back in Seattle in 1930.[2]

Splume (1968)

24

George Tsutakawa

1910-1997

In 1930 Callahan married Margaret Bundy, who was a co-editor of Town Crier, a literary magazine published in Seattle between 1912 and 1937.[4] The Callahans developed friendships with Dr. Richard Fuller (founder of the Seattle Art Museum), Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and other progressiveminded artists. Their home became a meeting-place for Seattle's arts community, including prominent Japanese-American artists Kenjiro Nomura and Kamekichi Tokita, and many others.[5] In 1933 - at age 27 - he gained national recognition with the inclusion of some of his paintings in the First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum, in New York. The same year he began his twenty-year tenure with SAM, when it opened its new building in Seattle's Volunteer Park. Over the next two decades he curated exhibitions at SAM, wrote a weekly arts column for The Seattle Times, and took trips to Europe and Latin America; his main focus, however, remained his painting. He had numerous exhibitions, was commissioned to do several murals (including post office murals for the Federal Art Project in Anacortes and Centralia, Washington and Rugby, North Dakota), and helped form the Group of Twelve, an "independent salon" of Northwest artists. In the late 1930s he and his wife began spending much of their time in the Robe Valley area of the North Cascades mountains;[6] during the Second World War he spent summers as a U.S. Forest Service fire lookout in the Cascades.[3] Margaret gave birth to their son Brian Tobey Callahan in 1938.[4] Callahan was a somewhat controversial figure within the arts community, with some artists seeing conflict of interest in his positions as artist, curator, and critic. In 1953 he ceased working at SAM. Later that same year Life magazine ran an article with large color photos extolling Callahan, Graves, Anderson, and Tobey as the "Mystic Painters of the Pacific Northwest".[2] Callahan never considered himself to be a "mystic" painter. In writings and interviews he explained that he wasn't interested in symbolism; rather, he saw his work as being firmly rooted in nature and art history - as it plainly was through the early part of his career. By the early 1960s, however, his style had become much more complex - and seemingly rife with symbolism. "He liked muscle-bound grandeur," wrote arts journalist Regina Hackett, "but released the figures who displayed it from the confines of gravity. Full of light, many hover on the edge of floating away."[7]Over time, figurative elements men, horses, trees, insects - disappeared from his work, in favor of pure abstraction, but still, said Callahan, "It is nature, with its unlimited varied form, structure, and color that constitutes the vital living force from which art must basically stem."[1] While Callahan enjoyed his status as a respected artist, the increasingly abstract style of his painting did not loan itself to ready sales.[4] He supplemented his income with occasional teaching jobs at various colleges, and in 1954 applied for and received a Guggenheim Fellowship.[2] In 1961 Margaret died of cancer; two years later his summer home/studio near the Stillaguamish River burned down while he was in Europe, with the loss of many paintings by both himself and friends. He married Beth Inge Gottfriedsen in 1964, and they moved to Long Beach, Washington, on the Pacific coast.[2] Callahan continued painting in his studio near the shore in Long Beach, but at a more relaxed pace.[3] The Seventies saw two unusual commissioned works: In 1972 he designed costumes and sets for the Seattle Repertory Theatre's production of Macbeth, and in 1976, the owner of Longacres racetrack asked him to do a series of paintings of horses for an on-site restaurant. Callahan, a lifelong horse lover, enjoyed the assignment immensely.[2] In 1973, the Henry Art Gallery presented Universal Voyages, the most comprehensive retrospective of Callahan's work ever mounted.[8] In 1975, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full member in 1977. In 1984 Callahan moved back to Seattle and turned his artistic attention to urban life, in contrast with the sea and light studies that dominated his work during two decades at Long Beach. In May, 1986, following a brief illness, he died at his home in Seattle. He was 81 an American painter and sculptor best known for his avant-garde bronze fountain designs. Born in Seattle, Washington, he was raised in both the United States and Japan. He attended the University of Washington, where, after serving in the U.S. Army during World War Two, he became a teacher. He rose to international prominence as a fountain designer in the 1960s and 70's. During his long career more than 70 of his distinctive fountains - many of them still extant - were placed in public spaces. He is often associated with the progressive 'Northwest School' of artists, and is among the major, influential figures of modern Asian-American art. He died in Seattle in 1997. George Tsutakawa was born February 22, 1910, in Seattle, Washington.[1] He was named in honor of George Washington (whose birthday is Feb. 22nd). His parents, Shozo and Hisa, were both born in Japan. He was the fourth of nine children, all of whom, except for his eldest sister, were born in the U.S.. George's father and two uncles ran a successful import-export business, Tsutakawa Company, shipping mainly lumber and scrap metal to Japan, and general goods from Japan to the U.S.[2] George moved to his mother's hometown of Fukuyama, Japan, at age seven, along with his siblings, while his father remained in Seattle. His mother died of influenza in 1918; his father remarried. The family lived with their maternal grandmother. As a big, dairy-fed American kid who spoke very little Japanese, George had trouble fitting in, and found comfort in art. His grandparents introduced him to traditional Japanese art forms such as Kabuki and Noh drama, Sumi-e painting, calligraphy, wood-block printing, ceramics, flower arranging, and the tea ceremony; at the same time, he studied European and American art, and developed a lifelong love of Western classical music. He showed promise as an artist, but to his father's disappointment he was a mediocre student with little interest in joining the family business.[3]

Day Dream (1953)

After finishing high school and brief service as a reservist-trainee in the Japanese Army, Tsutakawa, 16, returned to the U.S. Now a Japanese-speaker, he enrolled in Seattle's Broadway High School, where he re-learned English and studied art, falling in with a group of progressive-minded young artists which included Morris Graves, Andrew Chinn, and Fay Chong.[4] He also visited and informally studied with Kamekichi Tokita, Kenjiro Nomura, and other older artists from Seattle's vibrant Asian-American arts community.[5] At the urging of Broadway High art teacher Hannah Jones, Tsutakawa enrolled in the University of Washington, where he studied under sculptor Dudley Pratt, who guided him both artistically and in the craft of producing large sculpture. He also worked with Alexander Archipenko, a renowned sculptor who occasionally taught classes at the U of W. Tsutakawa paid his tuition by working at a grocery owned by his uncle, and by working summers at a cannery in Alaska, which gave him the opportunity to visit native villages, examine the carvings on ceremonial buildings and totem poles, and talk to carvers. He made drawings and linocuts of fish, fishermen, the canneries, and the dramatic Alaskan landscape.[6] He continued to paint and make prints (as he would throughout his life), but, when it came time to declare his major, chose sculpture. He received his BFA in 1937. Although he had paintings and prints in several exhibitions, and was actively involved in Seattle's arts community, he didn't immediately focus on a career in art, as he was helping his uncles with the family business. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, most of Tsutakawa's Japanese-American friends and family were interned or relocated to primitive camps in the interior western U.S., and the Tsutakawa Company was seized by the government. Tsutakawa himself, as a male, U.S.-born Nisei of military age, was drafted into the Army. While training at Camp Robinson in Arkansas his artistic abilities became known, and he was often asked to paint portraits of officers, or murals in officers' clubs. He was later assigned to duty teaching Japanese language at a Military Intelligence School in Minnesota. In his free time he visited museums in Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, and New York.[7] Tsutakawa also visited friends and family in the internment camps. During a visit to the Tule Lake camp in California he met and fell in love with Ayame Iwasa, a friend of his sister Sadako. Although she was ten years younger than he, she was, like Tsutakawa, a Nisei who had been educated in Japan. He soon proposed marriage. She eventually accepted.[8] When the war ended, Tsutakawa returned to Seattle. Taking advantage of the G.I. Bill, he resumed studies at the University of Washington, earning his MFA degree.[9] In 1947 Ayame and George were married at a Buddhist temple in Seattle. The first of their four children was born later the same year.[10] In the late 40's Tsutakawa began teaching part-time at the University of Washington. An important influence on him at this time was a book, written by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Warren E. Burger, which depicted obos, the ceremonial stone piles created by religious pilgrims in the Himalayas. Tsutakawa eventually began teaching full-time. His work - mostly paintings, prints, small sculpture, and wood carving - was shown in the Northwest Annuals at the Seattle Art Museum, at the Henry Art Gallery, the Zoe Dusanne Gallery, and various other places. He did several commissioned pieces - including sculpture, door carvings, and gates - for local businesses and institutions. He also designed chairs, tables, and lamps. In 1954 he and Ayame bought a large house which became his studio and a regular meeting place for friends such as Paul Horiuchi, Mark Tobey, John Matsudaira, Johsel Namkung, and many others. In 1956 Tsutakawa travelled to Japan for the first time in nearly thirty years, visiting an exhibition of his and Horiuchi's work at the Yoseida Gallery in Tokyo and reuniting with family members.[11] In 1958 Tsutakawa was asked to design and build a fountain for the new main branch of the public library being built in downtown Seattle. He accepted, although he had never created a fountain before. After two years of daunting mishaps, he and Jack Uchida, a Boeing engineer who would become his lifelong technical expert and assistant, finished Fountain of Wisdom, a tall silicon bronze abstract design suggestive of obos, totem poles, and pagodas. Artist, public, and critics were all delighted with the work, whose fusion of Asian, Native American, and modern Abstract Expressionist elements was deeply evocative of the Pacific Northwest. Almost by happenstance, Tsutakawa had found a new medium for his artistic energies. In the 1970s and 80s Tsutakawa emerged as the world's preeminent creator of fountains, installing them in cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Japan.[12] "For Tsutakawa, ultimately water stands in relation to humanity and to life as the great continuing cycle of all things," art historian Martha Kingsbury pointed out.[13] Tsutakawa explained his fascination with fountains to interviewer Jane Estes in 1978: "Our sense of continuity and rhythm is universal in water. Even in childhood I was interested in running water, in the recycling process of water. I remember Mark Tobey talking to me about the life cycle of the universe and the fact that water moves about endlessly in its various forms, vapor, ice drops forming in the clouds to be released into the rivers. This recycling always fascinated me".[14] Beginning in the 1960s Tsutakawa traveled extensively. In addition to regular trips to Japan, he traveled throughout Asia, Europe, and Mexico. Tsutakawa designed, built, and installed 75 fountains. Most were made of bronze, though he used stainless steel and aluminum for a few. He often executed two or three fountain commissions a year, all while continuing to teach at the U of W and pursue his interests in other art forms. In 1976 Tsutakawa retired after 34 years of teaching Art and Architecture at the University of Washington. Named Professor Emeritus, he continued to teach occasional classes and participate in special events at the University.[15] In 1977 he traveled to Nepal, where he at last saw in person the stacked rocks of the obos whose forms had for so long influenced his work. He later described seeing more than twenty such piles against a backdrop of Mount Everest as the most exciting experience of his life.[16] 17 After an earlier heart attack left him weakened, Tsutakawa died at his home in Seattle on December 18, 1997.[

25, 26, 33

Everett G. DuPen

1912-2005

Youtube history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z4nLT2fb9k

27

Louis Potter

1873-1912

28

James A. When

1882-1973

American sculptor Louis McClellan Potter was born on November 14, 1873 in Troy, New York. Though little is known regarding his early childhood, his ambition to become an accomplished artist appears to have materialized following his matriculation to Trinity college in Hartford, Connecticut. It is here that Potter studied under portrait painters (and brothers), Charles Noel Flagg and Montague Flagg. Aspiring artists at the time were expected to study their craft in Europe for an extended period. Potter followed suit and, upon graduating from Trinity College, continued his education abroad. Promptly after arriving in Paris in 1896, Potter enrolled and was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux Arts. There he worked under renowned academic painter, Luc-Olivier Merson, and the equally renowned sculptor, Jean Auguste Dampt. Under their auspices, Potter’s artistic style matured, leading to the acceptance and display of his sculpture at the Paris Salon of 1899. It is also during this time that Potter would have been introduced to the work of Post Impressionist sculptor Auguste Rodin, whose preference for rough, textured surfaces seems to have inspired Potter’s style. Potter, like his European and American contemporaries, was also interested in ethnography, which was slowly evolving into cultural anthropology. Typology, the typing of other cultures, race, and social classes, was gradually giving way to a growing interest in exploring other cultures in earnest. Many nineteenth-century artists, including Paul Gauguin, were intrigued by the notion of “civilized” versus “primitive” art – an aesthetic exploration that would lead to the development of Fauvism, Cubism, and other early Modern art movements. Potter would have known something of Gauguin’s ventures in French Polynesia through his work, which was exhibited in Paris. Following Gauguin’s example, Potter embarked on his own expedition. Louis Potter traveled to French occupied Tunisia, arriving sometime before 1900 and promptly immersing himself in the Islamic culture. His Post Impressionist portraits of his subjects, both sketched and sculpted, reveal his genuine interest in and respect for their spiritual concerns. Potter’s talent did not go unnoticed by the Tunisian people, whom he represented in his sculptures exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. The Bey of Tunis recognized his unique service to the country by awarding him the decoration of an Office of Nichal Iftikhar (also known as the “Order of Victory of Tunisia”) that same year. Returning to America in 1901, Potter’s interest in cultural anthropology shifted from Islamic culture to a one geographically closer. Native American cultures had already come to the attention of late nineteenth-century American artists, who tended to either demonize or romanticize them in their work. Potter’s interest in Native Americans, however, appears to have grown out of his fascination with alternative concepts of spirituality. Potter became increasingly attracted to mysticism, occultism, and other modes of spiritual exploration. Potter traveled to the Pacific Northwest coast in 1905 to experience the ritualistic behavior of the Tlingit community. He appears to have approached his subject somewhat objectively, imbuing his forms with dignity. Potter’s sculptures appeared in exhibitions regularly until his unexpected death on August 19, 1912 in Seattle, Washington. But his popularity did not wane thereafter. Louis Potter’s sculpture was included in the Armory Show of 1913, where it was displayed alongside those of European modernists, including Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, and George Braque. Since then his work has found its way into numerous collections both private and public, including the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Trinity College, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. a Seattle-based sculptor noted for his statue of Chief Seattle, sculpted figures and medallions depicting historically significant persons. His work is displayed across the state and as far away as Chicago and New York. James Alfred Wehn was born on December 5, 1882, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the second-born of three sons. His father, John Christian Wehn, was of German immigrant descent. His mother, Clara (Sharp) Wehn had lived in Indianapolis her whole life. James had several aunts and uncles on both sides as well, with close ties with these relations remaining a constant both at an early age and in the years following his family’s relocation to Seattle in the spring of 1889. As a young boy James was susceptible to childhood illnesses, and had survived a diphtheria epidemic while the family still lived in the 7th ward of Indianapolis. The loss of the family's infant son, Herman, convinced John Wehn to accept an offer by foundry owner John M. Frink (1855-1914) to come out West for a chance at a better life. The family resettled uneventfully at the new Wehn homestead near Lake Washington, but only a couple of months later, on June 6, 1889, endured the Great Seattle Fire along with the rest of the city. The fire spared the home, which was located at 710 29th Avenue S. As his father helped John Frink rebuild the destroyed Washington Iron Works, the 7-year-old James earned the distinction of “Territorial Pioneer” as a new settler in the Washington Territory. At the age of 13, while confined to bed during one of his bouts of sickness, James was given a set of watercolor paints by a visiting nurse and encouraged to draw as a way to pass the time. He had a natural talent, and on the strength of a still life drawing became a student to a visiting painter: Rowena Nichols Leinss. Leinss encouraged the young James to also model sculptures in clay. Following her departure from the city, he continued to work on his own in this fashion. His preference for modeling subjects from life (when possible) would continue to be a hallmark of his work in both illustration and later in sculpture. In 1896, a new opportunity to study the arts came from the Seattle Art League recently started by Will Carson and Ella Shepard Bush. While attending classes part-time at the art school, James also began working with his father at the Washington Iron Works in Seattle, learning pattern making,

Dancers (1943) Singers (1943) Northwest Fishermen (1954) Medicine Man (1904)

Teller of Tales (1910)

castings of molds, and other foundry work. By the turn of the century and with the help of his father and uncle, James was able to secure an apprenticeship in Chicago with the studio of the Germanborn sculptor, August Hubert. The seven months spent working in the studio provided first-hand knowledge and instruction in how to model, mold, and cast sculptures in clay, plaster, and bronze. James then returned to Seattle, ready to start his own studio, one of the first of its kind dedicated to sculpture as a medium. James moved back to the family home at 29th Avenue S and used the small addition on the back of the house as a studio. Except for a brief period from 1915 to 1917, this location would serve as the sculptor’s studio his entire life. James Wehn’s initial artworks for the public were small relief plaques cast in plaster for interior decoration, and several portrait medallions and sculpture busts featuring the visages of such Northwest historical figures as Chief Leschi of the Nisqually tribe, Captain George Vancouver, pioneer Henry Yesler, and Princess Angeline. Several portrait medallions of national figures soon followed, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. From an early age, James had a fascination with local Native American tribes and culture. In April 1895, both he and his brother Harvey watched Angeline, daughter of Chief Seattle, walking down the street. James later remarked on it as being “what a thrill to us kids”(“J.A.W.”). It would also prove to be a formulating event for him as a future artist. Ten years later, Wehn would recall this eyewitness account in his creation of the casting mold for his portrait of Angeline (Kick-is-om-lo in Lushootseed) of the Suquamish tribe. The completed sculpture bust would be his first ever as a sculptor. As part of his desire to render his subjects as true to life as possible, the sculptor made frequent visits to Indian reservations around Puget Sound, including the Suquamish Tribe’s reservation at Port Madison and the Tulalip reservation north of Seattle. Wehn would spend hours talking with the inhabitants, learning about the history of the great chiefs, and sketching scenes of daily life for later reference modeling reliefs in his studio. While undaunted in his pursuit of sculpture as a life choice -- "to earn a living at the only thing he ever knew," as one friend put it -- Wehn had many personal tragedies to overcome, especially in the first half of his life (Clark to Monroe, November 22, 1971). His brother Harvey drowned in Lake Washington at age 14. His mother, Clara, suffered for years after the death of Harvey, her second son to have died, and required care at home until her death in 1928. James's first wife, Florence, whom he had married in 1915, was murdered just two years later, three blocks from the couple’s home on the west side of Queen Anne Hill (the murderer was never caught). And with the Great Depression in 1929, James struggled to both provide care for his ailing, live-at-home aunt, Mary Thiecke, while supporting his studio with irregular commissions and underfunded public art projects. In 1919, James was invited by University of Washington president Henry Suzzallo (1875-1933) to begin and instruct the first Department of Sculpture for the University’s College of Fine Arts. Over the next five years, James taught basic-level coursework in modeling techniques and casting processes to his sculpture students. Notable among those who graduated from his classes were John Carl Ely (1897-1929), who went on to New York to continue his studies and his own work. During the 1920s, Wehn also formed an acquaintance with another local sculptor in Seattle, Alonzo Victor Lewis (1886-1946). He and Lewis both served as judges for The Seattle Times soap carving competition in 1928 and 1929, after Wehn had left teaching at the University. Mary Clark recalled the relationship as one characteristic of James Wehn’s penchant for humor: "When I was trying to persuade Mr. W. to give me material for a biography for some future historian he wouldn’t tell me his middle name. There was a sculptor about Seattle at that time. One noted more for talk than work as far as we could tell. And when I heckled Mr. W. to tell he finally said ‘It’s Alonzo!’ Now that was the other mans’ middle name and I knew what Mr. W. thought of him. I never could decide whether it is his name and he didn’t like to say because the other man always used his name in full. Or perhaps more likely he just said it so I’d forget it"(Clark to Monroe, January 12, 1972). Despite a friendly rivalry between the two men, the sculptors collaborated on at least one sculpture project: a memorial plaque design in honor of pioneer Ezra Meeker (1830-1928). Wehn looked upon his teaching at the University of Washington with unblemished pride. In an article about the Sculpture Department published in May, 1923, he noted that he considered both Ely and another former student -- Sylvia Borst, at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art -- choosing to pursue sculpture as their life work, "his greatest monument" ("How Sculptors Are Started on their Careers at U. of W."). James Wehn is credited with many firsts in terms of his chosen profession in the arts, which lend credence to his own claim during his lifetime as being the "First Sculptor of Seattle." He sculpted Chief Seattle, the first statue commissioned by the City of Seattle as a public artwork; he founded the first Department of Sculpture at the University of Washington; he was the first sculptor of the Pacific Northwest to be named an Officer of the French Academy of Arts (1936), and, in the same year, created the first official design for the seal of the City of Seattle. He designed the first commemorative medal issued by the State of Washington in 1953; and he served for two years on the first Municipal Art Commission for Seattle, beginning in 1955. His versatility as an artist served him well throughout his career. At the beginning of 1940 and at the age of 58, Wehn was awarded membership into the Craftmens’ Guild of Washington for his design and casting work on several local architectural projects and buildings in the city. The year would also see him complete yet another first in terms of sculpture achievements on a national level, with the largest castings of relief panels in concrete ever made for a public works project. These were the triptych relief panels, designed by Architect Lloyd Lovegren and artist James Fitzgerald (1910-1973) and cast by Wehn, for the Mount Baker Tunnel’s east entrance, as part of the construction for the new Lake Washington Floating Bridge completed in 1940. Wehn may also be the first sculptor to have performed unofficial conservation work on public statuary for the city. He repaired the plaque on the base of the William Seward statue in Volunteer Park on three occasions during his life, the first time in 1930.

29

Morris Graves

1910-2001

In sculpture, James Wehn valued realism and accuracy of physical appearance above all else. His views on the merits of this approach were passionate and formed over years of labor in his studio, but also, were the result of his fundamental beliefs concerning what was “modern art” and what constituted “historical sculpture.” James was not opposed to modern art as a recognized movement in the art world, but was quick to point out the differences between works being classified in his day as belonging to the movement, and his own work in sculpture: "We’re going through what we call ‘modern’ art ... but, some of these things that go back hundreds of years were called modern art then. Modern art ... has its place because it puts people to thinking. Out of this comes good sometimes. You can’t do a historical portrait that is modern art ... if it’s historical, it has to be realistic. If you do it modern, it has to be called a caricature"(Johnson, 16). During his lifetime, James Wehn created more than 300 medallions, medals, statuary, and other sculptures. In 1967, He bequeathed his entire studio collection to the Washington State Historical Society for safekeeping. The following year, the Society made him a David Douglas Fellow for a lifetime of achievement in the field of historical portraiture. While the majority of sculptures by James Wehn were made as local commissions reflecting the history of the Pacific Northwest, others can be found throughout Washington state as well as in Alaska, and in cities such as Chicago, Boston and New York. His public sculptures and designs can still be seen today in more than two dozen places around the City of Seattle, including half a dozen portrait plaques for the Seattle Public Schools. James Wehn died on October 2, 1973, at the age of 91. an American painter. He was one of the earliest Modern artists from the Pacific Northwest to achieve national and international acclaim. His style, referred to by some reviewers as Mysticism, used the muted tones of the Northwest environment, Asian aesthetics and philosophy, and a personal iconography of birds, flowers, chalices, and other images to explore the nature of consciousness. An article in a 1953 issue of Life magazine cemented Graves' reputation as a major figure of the 'Northwest School' of artists. He lived and worked mostly in Western Washington, but spent considerable time traveling and living in Europe and Asia, and spent the last several years of his life in Loleta, California.[ Morris Cole Graves was born August 28, 1910, in Fox Valley, Oregon, where his family had moved about a year before his birth, from Seattle, Washington, in order to claim land under the Homestead Act. He was named in honor of Morris Cole, a favored minister of his Methodist parents. He had five older brothers, and eventually, two younger siblings.[2][3] Constant winds and cold winters made it much more difficult than expected to establish a working farm, and the struggle led to bankruptcy of the senior Graves' once-thriving paint and wallpaper store in Seattle. In 1911, a few months after Morris' birth, the family returned to the Seattle area,[3] settling north of the city in semi-rural Edmonds, Washington.[4] He was a self-taught artist with natural understandings of color and line. Graves dropped out of high school after his sophomore year, and between 1928 and 31, along with his brother Russell, visited all the major Asian ports of call as a steamship hand for the American Mail Line.[1] On arriving in Japan, he wrote: "There, I at once had the feeling that this was the right way to do everything. It was the acceptance of nature not the resistance to it. I had no sense that I was to be a painter, but I breathed a different air."[5] In his early twenties, Graves finished high school in 1932 in Beaumont, Texas, while living with his maternal aunt and uncle. He then returned to Seattle, and received his first recognition as an artist when his painting Moor Swan (1933) won an award in the Seattle Art Museum's Northwest Annual Exhibition and was purchased by the museum.[2] He split his time between Seattle and La Conner, Washington, where he shared a studio with Guy Anderson. Graves' early work was in oils and focused on birds touched with strangeness, either blind, or wounded, or immobilized in webs of light.[5] Graves began his lifelong study of Zen Buddhism in the early 1930s. In 1934, he built a small studio on family property in Edmonds, Washington. When it burned to the ground in 1935, almost all of his work to date was lost with it. His first one-man exhibition was in 1936 at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM);[2] that same year he began working under Bruce Inverarity at the Seattle unit of the WPA's Federal Art Project. His participation was sporadic, but it was there that he met Mark Tobey and became impressed with Tobey's calligraphic line. In January 1937 Graves traveled to New York City to study with the controversial Father Divine's International Peace Mission movement in Harlem; on his return, in May, he bought 20 acres (81,000 m2) on Fidalgo Island. In 1938 he quit the FAP and went to the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico to paint.[1] In 1940, Graves began building a house, which he named The Rock, on an isolated promontory on his Fidalgo Island property. He lived at The Rock with a succession of cats and dogs, all called Edith, in honor of poet Edith Sitwell.[2 Graves was known for his personal charm and bursts of puckish humor, but also spent long periods in semi-isolation, absorbed in nature and his art. At the Rock, with the Second World War erupting, he retreated for a particularly long time and created a very large number of paintings. Many of them, such as Dove of the Inner Eye (1941) and Bird in the Night (1943), featured what would become Graves' iconic motif of birds trapped in layers of webbing or barbs, representing the artist's fears for the survival of man and nature in the face of modern industry and warfare. His near-isolation was interrupted in the Spring of 1942 when the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened its Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States exhibition. Critics raved over Graves' contributions, all of which were quickly snapped up by museums and collectors. At the same time the U.S. Army came looking for him, as he had failed to achieve the conscientious objector status he had applied for. There was also suspicion of him due to his association with the International Peace Mission and the fact that among his few regular visitors at the Rock had been the brilliant Japanese-American designer George Nakashima and his Japanese-born wife Miriam, prior to their being sent to the Minidoka relocation center. While his work was receiving further exhibition in New York and

Church in Enumclaw (1935)

30

Ambrose Patterson

1877-1967

Washington D.C., and phenomenal sales, the artist himself spent much of that same time in the stockade at Camp Roberts, California, where he went into a deep depression. He was finally released from military service in March 1943.[1][2] With help from longtime supporters Elizabeth Willis and Nancy Ross, and Marian Willard, owner of the Willard Gallery in New York, Graves' work continued to enjoy popularity throughout the war years and beyond, with numerous exhibitions.[1] In the late 40s he purchased land in Woodway, Washington, and began construction of a unique cinderblock house he came to call "Careladen".[4] Graves received a Guggehheim Fellowship allowing him to study in Japan, but only made it as far as Hawaii before his entry was blocked by Japan's U.S. military occupation authorities. He spent several months in 1947 painting and learning the Japanese language in Hawaii. By the late 1940s Graves' and Mark Tobey's moment as the stars of the New York art world had faded, supplanted by the post-war rise of Action Painting and pure Abstraction.[1] In 1949 Graves sailed to England aboard RMS Mauretania, spending a month as the guest of art collector Edward James. He then spent three solitary winter months in France, sketching and painting the Chartres Cathedral. This austere interlude may have been in response to critical complaints of superficiality in his more recent paintings; however, after returning to Seattle in 1950, he destroyed most of his Chartres works.[2] In 1952 photographer Dody Weston Thompson used part of her Albert M. Bender grant to photo document the unique home and surroundings of Graves, who she considered a close friend. In the Spring of 1953, Graves staged the first Northwest art "Happening", sending invitations to everyone on the Seattle Art Museum mailing list: You or your friends are not invited to the exhibition of Bouquet and Marsh paintings by the 8 best painters in the Northwest to be held on the afternoon and evening of the longest day of the year, the first day of summer, June 21, at Morris Graves' palace in exclusive Woodway Park. Guests, some in formal evening wear, arrived to find the driveway blocked by a trench; investigating on foot, they found a banquet table with a ten-dayold turkey feast being drenched by a garden sprinkler as dinner music and farm animal sounds played over speakers. With Graves and his cohorts refusing to answer the door, guests, amused and otherwise, responded by storming off, sketching the scene, or filching silverware from the table.[2][5] In September 1953, largely through the efforts of Seattle gallery owner Zoe Dusanne, Life magazine ran a major article on the "Mystic Painters of the Northwest", focusing on Graves, Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson as the major figures of a perceived Northwest School of artists.[6] Ironically, by this time the four had for the most part fallen out over various personal, political, and artistic issues, and were barely on speaking terms with each other.[1] Graves' mid-career works were influenced by East Asian philosophy and mysticism, which he used as a way of approaching nature directly, avoiding theory. He adopted certain elements of Chinese and Japanese art, including the use of thin paper and ink drawing. He painted birds, pine trees, and waves. Works such as Blind Bird showed the influence of Mark Tobey, who was in turn inspired by Asian calligraphy. Graves switched from oils to gouaches, his birds became psychedelic, mystic, en route to transcendence. The paintings were bold, applied in a thick impasto with a palette knife, sometimes on coarse feed sacks.[7] In the 1950s, Graves returned to oils, but also painted in watercolor and tempera. By 1954 Graves was feeling oppressed both by resurgent popularity and the encroachment of suburban development around his home. After spending several weeks in Japan, he rented Careladen to the poet Theodore Roethke and moved to Ireland. With companions Richard Svare and Dorothy Schumacher he lived in various parts of the country before settling on Woodton Manor, a rustic 18th century house near Dublin. In Ireland he created paintings known as the Hibernation series and became fascinated with the night sky. This led to Instruments for a New Navigation, a collection of precisely rendered bronze, glass, and stone sculptures inspired by the dawning Space Age. Finding no market for these unusual pieces, they were disassembled and not displayed again until 1999.[1][2] Graves returned to Seattle in 1964, living for several months in the so-called Pletscheff Mansion.[8] In 1965 Graves purchased 380 acres of redwood forest property, around a five-acre lake, in Loleta, California, near Eureka. He hired architect Ibsen Nelsen to design a home which, after numerous technical and financial problems, was eventually constructed beside the lake. Graves would live on this property, which he called simply 'The Lake', for the remaining 35 years of his life. Although a sign posted at the entrance to the property read "No visitors today, tomorrow, or the day after", Graves' assistant Richard Yarber lived there with him much of the time, and he occasionally allowed visits by family members and old friends.[4] In his sixties, Graves began a new phase of minimalist paintings of floral arrangements, works with a simplicity intended as a statement about the nature of beauty. He unpacked the "Instruments of a New Navigation" sculptures and completed them. He continued working in his garden, tending his flowers and manicuring the landscape of The Lake.[9] Morris Graves died the morning of May 5, 2001 at his home in Loleta, hours after suffering a stroke.] Patterson was born in Daylesford, Victoria. He studied at the Melbourne Art School under E. Phillips Fox and Tudor St George Tucker,[1] at the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne and continued his studies in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian under Lucien Simon, André Lhote and Maxime Maufra. In Paris he became a friend of compatriot Nellie Melba, the famous soprano; Patterson's brother, Tom, was married to Melba's sister, Belle.[2] Through Melba's influence, he was able to continue his studies with John Singer Sargent. He became part of the Paris arts scene and exhibited at the first Salon d'Automne exhibitions. He had five paintings at the 1905 Paris Salon at which Henri Matisse and the fauves stunned the art world. After a visit to his homeland in 1909 or 1910, he spent the following seven years in Hawaii. Following a year in San Francisco, he moved to Seattle to work

The Artist’s Garden, Laurelhurst (1964)

as a freelance artist, perhaps being the first modern artist in that city. In 1919 he established the University of Washington School of Painting and Design. Patterson married painter and former student Viola Hansen in 1922, and the two became major figures of the arts in the Pacific Northwest region. Patterson taught until his retirement in 1947. He died in Seattle in 1967. The Art Gallery of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery (Australia) (Canberra), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum and the Tacoma Art Museum are among the public collections holding works by Ambrose McCarthy Patterson. 31 32

Door Handles Glen Alps

1914-1996

a printmaker and educator who is credited with having developed the collagraph.[1] A collagraph is a print whose plate is a board or other substrate onto which textured materials are glued. The plate may be inked for printing in either the intaglio or the relief manner and then printed onto paper. Although the inventor of the process is not known, Alps made collagraphy his primary art form and coined the word "collagraph" in 1956.[2] He disseminated the techniques he developed for making collagraphs during his long career as both an artist and a teacher. Alps was born in 1914 on a farm near Loveland, Colorado. He attended Colorado State College of Education (today University of Northern Colorado) in Greeley, Colorado, where he received the Bachelor of Arts in 1940. After graduation he worked as an art instructor in the Greeley County school system until 1942, when he took a job in the publishing department of Culver Aircraft Factory in Wichita. In 1945 he returned to school at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was awarded the Master of Fine Arts in 1947. During that summer Alps studied with printmaker Mauricio Lasansky (b. 1914) at the University of Iowa.[3] Alps's early work in printmaking was in keeping with the realism of American Regionalists Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood,[4] but by the end of 1947 his work had turned toward abstraction and vivid color, judiciously used. The excitement of printmaking for Alps was in the creative process. He preferred small editions to large ones, and was prolific in his production. At this time he worked in lithography, screenprinting and etching. A favorite abstract motif was the circle in a square which, according to arts reviewer John Voorhees, became a type of "trademark" for the artist that he often used in his work.[5] Glen Alps began teaching in the Art Department of the University of Washington while he was still a graduate student there. In 1947 the chairman of the department, Walter F. Jacobs, invited Alps to teach classes in watercolor and design as an acting associate of the school. He soon began teaching printmaking, as well. After graduation Alps's teaching career at the University of Washington continued. He received tenure in 1954 and became a full professor in 1962. He was named Professor Emeritus upon his retirement from teaching in 1984. Among his colleagues in the Art Department were the painters Wendell Brazeau (1910–1974), Boyer Gonzales (1909–1987), Alden Mason (b. 1919) and Spencer Moseley (1936–1998); modernist jewelry designer and craftsman, Ruth Pennington (1905–1998) [6] and sculptor George Tsutakawa (1910–1997).[7] Bill Ritchie (b. 1941), multimedia artist, also taught printmaking until 1984.[8] Alps's students include the printmaker and painter Barbara Bruch,[9] printmaker, basket weaver and glass artist Joe Feddersen,[10] printmaker Gerald Ferstman,[11] the painters and collaborative sculptors Tom Northington and Mary Rothermel;[12] assemblage and mosaic artist, Glen Michaels (b. 1927) and painter and sculptor James W. Washington, Jr. (1908–2002). By many accounts Alps was an inspirational teacher. In a 1981 interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art (SAAM), Glen Michaels remembered Alps as "the one who opened my eyes to Op Art. His whole design concept was optical illusion, taking a flat surface and turning it into a sculptural thing. Experiments that he was doing that were so fertile and so exciting I’ve never seen anything like since."[13] Writers on the subject of collagraphy are careful to point out that while Glen Alps developed the artform and coined the term "collagraph" to describe it, he did not "invent" collagraphy.[14] Elementary collagraphic techniques can be detected in prints dating from the 19th century, and the development in the early 20th century of collage as an art form led to the idea that objects (including bits of paper, fabric, metal and sand) collaged on to a printing plate could be inked and printed for textural effects. Artists who predated Alps in the use of this concept include the Norwegian Rolf Nesch and the Americans Boris Margo (1902–1995), Edmond Casarella (1920–1996) and Roland Ginzel (b. 1921).[15] Alps began working in the technique in the fall of 1956, when he was an associate professor in the School of Art at the University of Washington. He was investigating art techniques that would stimulate creativity and, as he wrote, "...dramatically release the inner-most quality of being" of the artist.[16] Alps shared the idea with his students at that time, and they became his colleagues in experimenting with the new art form.[17] It became evident to Alps early on in his development of the process that he needed a name for it. The word that he coined,"collagraph", is a union of the words "collage" and "-graph."[18] Artists who later created notable works in collagraphy include Dean Meeker (1920–2002) and Edward Stasack (b. 1929).[19] In 1960 Alps received a fellowship to the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico, where he created a group of lithographs. In the 1970s he originated the technique (which is no longer practiced) of pouring automotive lacquer over a Masonite plate and selectively burning away the lacquer with a jeweler's torch. The plate was then inked and printed. Alps used the technique in combination with collagraphy. In 1988 Alps was an artist-in-residence at Pilchuck Glass School. During this time he met glass artist Harvey Littleton, who introduced Alps to vitreography. Assisted by Littleton's printer at the time, David Wharton, Alps created a vitreograph titled "Pilchuck Summer."[27] Alps also designed and manufactured about thirty fine art printing presses. The Glen Alps Press was reputed to be durable, versatile and easy to operate.[28] Prints by Glen Alps can be found in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale [Paris],[29] Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University Art Museums, Library of Congress, Los Angeles County Museum of Art,[29] Loveland [Colorado] Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art [New York],[30] Portland Art

Glen Alps Friezes

Museum (Oregon), Seattle Art Museum,[29] and Yale University Art Gallery, among many others. Glen Alps married Ruby Surber, a fellow student at Colorado State College of Education, in 1939.[31] She preceded him in death in December, 1995. The couple had no children.[32] Murals Guy Anderson

1906-1998

an American Abstract Expressionist painter. Along with Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and Mark Tobey, Anderson was identified in a Life Magazine article as one of the "northwest mystics," also known as the Northwest School. Anderson grew up in a semi-rural setting north of Seattle, in the town of Edmonds, Washington, where he'd been born on November 20, 1906. Some of his early paintings portrayed his family home. A piano was an important presence in his house. His father, Irving Anderson, was a carpenter-builder and also a musician. From an early age Guy was intrigued by other cultures; he was particularly fascinated by the woodcarvings of Northern Coastal native tribes, and by the collection of Japanese prints owned by his piano teacher. As soon as he was old enough to do so on his own, he began commuting to the Seattle Public Library by bus to study art books.[1][ After graduating from Edmonds High School, Anderson briefly studied with Alaskan scenic painter Eustace Ziegler, who encouraged Anderson's careerlong preference for oil paints, and taught him how to draw nude figures, which would become important features of his work.[1][2] In 1929, Anderson applied for and won a Tiffany Foundation scholarship and spent the summer studying at the Tiffany estate on Long Island, New York. As there were no art museums in Seattle at that time, he delighted in weekend visits to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, examining the works of Rembrandt, Goya, Whistler, and many others.[1] On his return to Washington in the fall of 1929, Anderson set up a studio in an outbuilding on his parents' property, and had paintings included in a group show at the Fifth Avenue Gallery in downtown Seattle. The show piqued the interest of 19-year-old painter Morris Graves, who lived near Anderson, and the two became lifelong friends. In 1934 they traveled together to California in a beat-up panel truck, attempting to sell their paintings along the way. They also spent time painting near Monte Cristo in the North Cascade mountains. With the opening of the Seattle Art Museum in 1933, Anderson befriended its founder, Dr. Richard Eugene Fuller, and worked there for several years, off-and-on, as an installer and children's art teacher. His lifelong interest in Asian art and culture was deepened by both close exposure to the museum's major collection of Asian art and artefacts, and by socializing and sometimes painting with members of Seattle's vibrant Asian arts community.[3] In the Northwest Annual Exhibition of 1935 he won the Katherine Baker Purchase Award, and the museum mounted a solo exhibition of his work the following year.[1] In 1937, Anderson helped refurbish a burned-out house Morris Graves had discovered near the small town of La Conner, Washington, in the Skagit Valley, about sixty miles north of Seattle. The two decorated the earthen-floored studio with furniture made of driftwood and raw cedar logs.[1] Like many artists during the Great Depression, Anderson worked for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Hired by the program's Washington director, R. Bruce Inverarity, he taught at the Spokane Art Center in 1939-40, alongside painters Carl Morris and Clyfford Still, sculptor Hilda Deutsch, and muralist Ruth Egri. The center was widely praised as being among the most popular and productive of the more than 100 community art centers opened nationwide by the FAP.[4] Throughout the 1940s and 50s Anderson was very much involved in Seattle's bustling art community. Morris Graves and Mark Tobey had become artists of international reputation; Tobey's studio and the home of painters Margaret and Kenneth Callahan become centers of lively socializing and philosophical debate. Otto Seligman and Zoe Dusanne were championing abstract art at their respective galleries, while SAM, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Frye Art Museum cautiously supported it. Anderson taught at the Helen Bush School in Seattle and Ruth Pennington's Fidalgo Art School in La Conner, while working at SAM, building stone mosaic patios for well-to-do patrons, and producing driftwood art for the commercial market. He lived in Seattle's University District, but spent much of his time painting at Graves' studio in La Conner or at the Callahans' summer place in Granite Falls, Washington. After a very successful show at SAM in 1945, he purchased his own cabin in Granite Falls. In September 1953 he became nationally known when Life magazine ran a major feature presenting Anderson, Tobey, Graves, and Kenneth Callahan as the "big four" of Northwest mystic art.[1] In 1959 Anderson left Seattle for good. He rented a house on the edge of La Conner, where he found inspiration from the vast skies and natural settings of the surrounding area. He gathered rocks and driftwood, which he composed around his rustic home in various assemblages. He began painting large works on roofing paper purchased from a local lumber company. Working with large sheets of paper on the floor in the studio above his living room, Anderson used thinned oil paint and large brushes. The scale of the format enabled his brushstrokes to become expansive and expressive, while its texture gave unexpected complexities which he valued. Over the years his art ranged from densely worked and tightly composed figurative images of Northwest landscapes to large, sweeping brushstrokes with flowing, symbolic and iconographic forms. The male nude—often placed horizontally—figures prominently in many of his paintings. His works are often inspired by, and often titled after, Greek mythology and Native American iconography. I n 1966 Anderson traveled to Europe for the first time with friends and fellow artists Clayton and Barbara James. In 1975 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which, among other things, allowed him to visit major museums in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., and travel extensively in Mexico. In 1982 he visited Osaka, Japan for an exhibition featuring his work.[1] He received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Seattle Center in 1993, and many who knew him personally considered him a "living treasure." Anderson was a complex, affable, and generous man with a wide ranging mind and

a devious sense of humor. His paintings can be read in many ways, but he cherished the premise of the human figure—a prominent feature in many of his works—as being symbolic of the journey of life. Guy Anderson never quite achieved the international stature of his friends Tobey and Graves. This was partly due to bad luck - such as a newspaper strike leaving his first solo exhibition in New York (at the Smolin Gallery in 1962) unreviewed - but he turned down other important exhibition opportunities simply because he felt he didn't have enough material of sufficient quality ready.[1] He remained a pre-eminent artist with strong sales and major commissioned projects in the Pacific Northwest. In the 1980s, with his health declining, Anderson became increasingly dependent on a younger companion, Deryl Walls, who eventually became executor of his estate, and made the controversial decision to end Anderson's long association with Francine Seders, who had been his agent since 1966.[5] Walls eventually moved Anderson into his own home in Mount Vernon, Washington, where he died on April 30, 1998, aged 91 years.[