National Parks Artist-in-Residence Program

Artists have been part of national parks since the 1860s and 70s, when painters, photographers and writers played a vital role in documenting the spectacular landscapes of the West and convincing Congress to preserve certain places as a public trust.

Today, 29 national parks around the country participate in an Artist-In-Residence program for painters, sculptors, writers, poets, photographers, composers, performers and craft artists to live and work on site in the park. Usually, artists are expected to donate a piece of art or offer a public presentation in exchange for a place to live and work in the park for two weeks or more.

The photo above shows John B. Fairbanks (1855-1940) painting in Zion National Park in Utah.

The California Art Club - 100 Years

The California Art Club is celebrating its 100th birthday this month. They will be publishing a 264-page centennial book in early 2011 with a comprehensive, full-color history of the Club and its place within the traditional fine art movement. There are photos of plein air painters alongside a horse and behind a vintage (Model T?) car. Other highlights: they had the first Black American art exhibit in Los Angeles in 1929, Winston Churchill was a member in 1950, and for fifteen years their headquarters was in Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House in Los Angeles.

They have chapters in Los Angeles/Pasadena (the headquarters), Malibu/Ventura County, Orange County, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area and Santa Barbara. Paint-outs are offered quarterly statewide, and monthly in Pasadena.

They are currently having an exhibit at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery in San Francisco entitled Then & Now: Artists Explore the Bay Area. On view through January 9, the show features paintings by Brian Blood, John Burton, Larry Cannon, Christin Coy, Suzanne D'Arcy, Teresa Dong, Drew Fagan, Mark Farina, Robert Hunt, David Jenks, Laurie Kersey, Jeanette LeGrue, Karen Leoni, Richard Lindenberg, Huihan Liu, Kim Lordier, Ann McMillan, Ning Mercer, Clark Mitchell, Kristine Pallas, Camille Przewodek, Michael Reardon, Robert Semans, Thomas Soltesz, Bryan Taylor, Alfredo Tofanelli, Kay Young and Jeff Ziarno.

Anna Ancher (1859-1935) - An Impressionist in Denmark

The Skagen Museum celebrated the 150th anniversary of Anna Ancher's birth this year. She was a member the Skagen School of Impressionists that formed in this picturesque, sunny village which sits on the north end of the Jutland peninsula in Denmark. She had actually grown up there, the daughter of an innkeeper. When she was born, Hans Christian Andersen was a guest, and Anna's mother saw this as an omen of special talents in her daughter. As a teenager, Anna studied art in Copenhagen for three winters, and ten years later in Paris at the atelier of Pierre Puvis de Chavennes. As Skagen became an artist's colony, she learned from the artists who spent time at her parents' inn: the poet and artist Holger Drachmann, Carl Lacher, Karl Madsen, Christian Krohg, P.S. Kroyer, Viggo Johansen, Swedish painter Oscar Bjork, Danish court portraitist Laurits Tuxen, and painter Michael Ancher, who would marry Anna.

She became a sucessful painter, receiving medals in Paris for her entries in the Expositions Universelles of 1889 and 1900, one of only two Danish painters to receive praise by the French critics. She won medals at other international and Danish exhibitions, including the Ingenio et Arti medal from the Danish king in 1913.

Her subject matter was primarily domestic scenes and figures, but she focused to a great extent on color, light and the abstract arrangement of shapes (see "Sunshine in the Blue Room," below).


The Skagen Museum was founded by the artists themselves in 1908 and has about 1500 of their works. More paintings are on view a few blocks away at the restored, 200-year-old Ancher house, which includes both Michael's and Anna's studios. Many doors in the house have been painted with birds and tulips by Michael and Helga, their daughter.

Sources:

Dictionary of Women Artists
Delia Gaze (Editor) Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997

Gourmet Magazine, July 1997, "A Painters' Paradise by the Sea" by Anne Roston

Emily Carr, Canadian Icon

(Our appreciation goes out to Robert Genn whose helpful website called painterskeys provided the lively quotations by Emily Carr in this article.)

Emily Carr, Canadian painter, writer and potter, was born on the island of Victoria, British Columbia, in 1871. In her late teens, she spent three years studying art in San Francisco and then visited England to study watercolor. Eventually, she spent two years in France learning about Post-Impressionism and the colorful Fauves.

"I think that one's art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows."

She had always loved the native cultures, the Haida, Gitksan and Tsimshian, and when she returned to Vancouver she spent time traveling up the Skeena River and along the coast to the Queen Charlotte Islands and Moresby Island documenting their houses, masks and totem poles.

"Indian Art broadened my seeing, loosened the formal tightness I had learned in England's schools. Its bigness and stark reality baffled my white man's understanding... I had been schooled to see outsides only, not struggle to pierce."

Later, she focused on the landscape, purchasing a caravan trailer ("The Elephant") for plein air sketching trips into the forests of British Columbia. She often used oils on paper, which contributed to her fluid, spontaneous brushstrokes.

"I sat staring, staring, staring – half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born."

At the age of 57, she was invited to participate in an exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada and traveled to Ottawa where she met the Group of Seven. She found the work of Lawren Harris especially inspiring, and he became a friend, saying that she was "one of them." She returned from this eastern trip to begin the most productive period of her career, creating the inspired, powerful canvases for which she is best known. Her work was exhibited in London, Paris, Washington and Amsterdam, as well as major Canadian cities.

"I have been sent more ridiculous press notices. People are frequently comparing my work with Van Gogh... I do hope I do not get bloated and self-satisfied. When proud feelings come I step up over them to the realm of work, to the thing I want, the liveness of the thing itself."

Van Gogh's Illustrated Letters

Bibliodyssey has a long post of some of Van Gogh's illustrated letters. From the year 1878 through 1890, you can see his draftsmanship improving and his unique style emerging.

Regardless of what you think about his paintings or his life, his letters will touch you with their poignancy and reverance for life and work.

A link to another website that has many more of his letters is included.

Pierre Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819)

À la villa Farnèse: Two Poplars
oil on paper, 10"x15"

Artists have been painting oil sketches in the open air since the 17th century, and by the late 18th century the practice was fairly common, especially in Italy, which attracted painters from all over Europe.

One of these was Pierre Henri de Valenciennes. He was best known for historical landscapes and his treatise on perspective (Elemens de Perspective Pratique a l'Usage des Artistes), which he studied with a mathematician in Rome, but he was also probably the foremost advocate of the importance of plein air painting.

He emphasized to his students (two of whom became teachers of Camille Corot) that capturing the particular details of a specific location (a "landscape portrait") was an essential practice for a painter, and he was committed to raising the status of landscape painting.

Sources:
Stair Sainty Gallery
The National Gallery, London

Clive Pates - Essay

Clive Pates curated an exhibit of landscape painters for the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, two years ago ("The Will to Endure - Six Contemporary Landscape Painters"). He wrote an introduction for the exhibit in which he points out the role of plein air painting in breaking down the conventions of 19th Century academic painting and eventually leading to abstract and non-objective art.

"The uniqueness of the Plein-Air painting is its reliance on direct perception. ... Experimentation and the need to break down older structures of meaning extended boundary lines in terms of the way we understand painting. There were created rich new techniques and possibilities for using paint that could only have evolved with an understanding of purely abstract forms of painting developed through this conscious act of looking."

He goes on to say that we seem to be at a similar crossroads today, with imposed meaning again becoming the gatekeeper in the art world, and the plein air painter in a position to stand for the value of direct perception.

"Contemporary painting is often prescriptive and relies on a very developed art community structure for success or failure, so once again we can see a new academia reigning over the way we perceive art. There is a need for re-appraisal within contemporary art; a re-evaluation of traditional realism is also long overdue. Purely perceptual painting is now placed outside of the newly formed arts academy structures, the low art counterpoint to the glorious and triumphant modernist experiment. The landscape painter has the potential to re-integrate the last century of experimentation into the landscape. The landscape can now be seen in its purist form of the abstract mark, perceived and invested with meaning."

Escalante Canyons Art Festival / Everett Ruess Days

Everett Ruess was was 20 years old when he vanished in 1934, a lone wanderer, poet and artist who loved the Sierras and the Red Rock Country of Arizona and Utah. He was a friend of Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Maynard Dixon and his wife Dorothea Lange. The mystery of his disappearance, the poignancy of his letters, journals and poems, and the power of his artwork have made him into a legend.

Since 2004, there has been an Art Festival in his honor near the place where he was last seen. This year it will be held from September 20-27 in Escalante, Utah. Events include a plein air paint-out, a fine arts and crafts exhibit and sale, lectures, poetry and discussions about Everett Ruess, exhibits, workshops, gallery open houses, walking tours of nearby historic buildings, and performances by cowboy poets, dance groups and musicians.

There will be an all-day free workshop on Wednesday, September 23rd with several professional painters demonstrating throughout the day. A four-day workshop with Linda Feltner from September 26-29 will also be offered ($780).

W.L. Rusho's book Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty explores his life and the mysteries surrounding him. Recently, his body was found and a story has been revealed about how he was murdered (with robbery as the motive, which seems a terrible shame, given the small value of his possessions and the huge value of his potential as an artist).

"I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bread by cities. . . it is enough that i am surrounded by beauty."
- Everett Ruess

Sven Birger Sandzen (1871-1954)

Visiting my parents in Denver last week, I happened to see an article in the Post about a two-day exhibit at David Cook Fine Art of Swedish-American painter (and Renaissance man) Sven Birger Sandzen, who spent much time in the western U.S., including Rocky Mountain National Park, Yellowstone, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, the Grand Canyon, Bryce & Zion in Utah and Taos & Santa Fe in New Mexico.

As a student of the renowned painter Anders Zorn in Stockholm at age 20, Sandzen wrote to his parents, "Zorn stood looking over my shoulder for about twenty minutes when I started painting...he said: 'Now we will see how most easily we can get a simple, natural, and beautiful result in this painting. What colors will Mr. Sandzen select? Sienna, ochre, white. Fine, go ahead now, broadly and vigorously without being afraid. If one is afraid and doesn't press on, one will never see what the mistakes are.' I was numb with amazement. Soon a light appeared indicating to me how one shall use color - simply, strongly, truthfully." This sense of color would later serve him well when he came out west.








He later studied in Paris and was influenced by Impressionism, Pointillism and Post-impressionist color theory.

Sandzen came to the United States in 1894 to teach at Bethany College in the Swedish settlement town of Lindsborg, Kansas. He learned English there and taught French, Swedish, German, music and choir in addition to art and art history. He lived there for the rest of his life, although he traveled widely and received offers to join the faculty of well-known art schools and universities. The Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery was established in Lindsborg as an educational resource and a tribute to him.

The works that we saw in Denver were a wide selection from public and private sources, a combination of watercolor, oil, lithographs and block prints, including pointillistic woodblocks made with nails. Shown here are a watercolor (top) an oil (above) and a lithograph.


~ Sarah Judson


References:
Lindquist, Emory, Birger Sandzen, An Illustrated Biography, The Birger Sandzen Memorial Foundation, 1993
MacMillan, Kyle, Swedish artist who captured state..., The Denver Post, Friday June 19, 2009

Carl William Peters 1897-1980

Carl William Peters has been called "one of the best-kept secrets of 20th Century American art."

He grew up in New York state, in both rural and urban situations, and studied art at the (then) Mechanics Institute in Rochester (now the Rochester Institute of Technology). He became friends with Charles and Emile Gruppe and later attended lectures by Robert Henri at the Art Students League in New York City and its summer school in Woodstock.

While he was learning and beginning to establish himself as an artist in the early years of the last century, Modernism and Impressionism were the primary influences in the art world. American art in general and representational art in particular had gone out of fashion. But Peters always painted common local scenes, both natural and man-made.

Eventually he painted in New England, especially Cape Ann, an artist colony which had been called "The Brittany of America." Art colonies originated in Europe and later appeared in the U.S. around the turn of the last century. They were instrumental in the development of plein-air painting and Impressionism. Certain elements of cubism appear in Peters' work, adding a "Cezannesque formalism" to his basically realist style.

- Sarah Judson

References:

Love, Richard H., Carl W. Peters, American Scene Painter, from Rochester to Rockport, Boydell & Brewer, 1999

Shipp, Steve, American Art Colonies 1850-1930, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996

The Hudson River Fellowship

The Hudson River Fellowship is a program to revive the traditional skills of the landscape painters of the Hudson River School. Field studies are an essential part of the curriculum, including pencil drawings, tonal studies and plein air oil sketches. Theory and larger studio painting are also covered.
This charcoal and white chalk sketch is by James David Smillie, dated 1881.

Landscapes of Gustav Klimt

We all know Gustav Klimt from his decorative Art Nouveau paintings, such as "The Kiss," involving gold leaf and mosaic effects. It might come as a surprise to learn that he was also a plein air painter.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire that he grew up in was a cultural center for music, politics, architecture and psychology as well as art. Klimt was the son of an engraver and was influenced by everyone from Freud to Monet and Van Gogh.

His landscapes are quite decorative, flattened and patterned, as opposed to representational. He is said to have used binoculars when choosing a scene to paint. He includes little or no sky, focusing instead on earth, wood and water.

A Symbolist, he painted an apple tree as "The Tree of Life," a house as an archetypal House, a lake or swamp as the primordial source of life. The elements and colors in the paintings are arranged in a naturalistic harmony, like a hymn. He used a square format which implied tranquility and stability, and his pointillistic brush strokes implied infinity without resorting to the use of perspective.

These fairly large (2-3 foot) paintings are a combination of plein air and in-studio work, and a combination of exterior scenes and inner visions.

- Sarah Judson


Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt - The Landscapes, Verlag Galerie Welz, Salzburg, 1981

Constable in Context

John Constable (1776-1837) was, along with J.M.W. Turner, a visionary who brought pure landscape painting into the spotlight. It had existed in Holland as early as the 17th century, and (in an idealized form) in the Romantic picturesque scenes of Gainsborough, but it was Constable and Turner who paved the way for the plein-air painters of the Barbizon School and later the Impressionists.

Constable grew up in Suffolk, where the rural landscape of canals, barges, mills and heavy horses became his muse. In the face of the Industrial Revolution, these ordinary scenes were a political and religious, as well as an aesthetic, commitment for him. He saw agriculture as the foundation for a stable society.

He spent two years at the London Royal Academy but preferred studying nature first hand. He often spent summers sketching outdoors, and in winter his large (often up to 6’) paintings were done in the studio. He was concerned with the accuracy of his sketches and noted time of day, effects of wind and weather, and specific relationships between plants, animals & elements. He focused on patterns of light and shadow, the “chiaroscuro of nature.” This emphasis on authenticity and spontaneous sketching outdoors as a counterbalance to classical painting resonated with French painters, and he received a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1824 for The Hay Wain.

The only major painting he completed on-site was Boatbuilding Near Flatford Mill (top right), but as he grew older he painted many expressive plein-air watercolors, such as Stonehenge (below right).






Sources:

Belsey, Hugh, From Gainsborough to Constable, Boydell & Brewer, 1991
Mendelowitz, Daniel Marcus, Drawing, Stanford University Press
http://www.metmuseum.org/

- Sarah Judson

George Bellows - An Artist in Action

One of the most popular and successful painters of his day, George Bellows (1882-1925), himself a talented college athlete and semi-pro baseball player, is best known for his action-charged paintings of “fight club” boxing matches.

Together with Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper, he was a star student of Robert Henri (known fondly to his students as “the Boss”). George Bellows is associated with the Ashcan School, which depicted the gritty reality of turn of the century urban America.

The boxing paintings have overshadowed his other work – landscapes, cityscapes, portraits and lithographs. As a student of Henri, all of his work is based on extensive sketches, studies and direct plein air work. The illustrations in this book show an interesting metamorphosis from a bravura mastery reminiscent of Sargent in his earlier work to a searching experimentalism in his later plein air paintings, more akin to Bonnard. The later are almost tentative, soft-edged, with close value ranges and bucolic subject matter - some with Fauvist tendencies (Mountain Orchard, 1922, oil on panel, 20 x 24, above), while the earlier are decisive, high-contrast images with “knock your socks off” large masses of deep, deep darks, hard edges, unconventional subject matter and challenging compositions (Forty-Two Kids, 1907, oil on canvas, 42 x 60, right), and Snow Dumpers, 1911, oil on canvas, 35 x 48, below).

His tragic death from a ruptured appendix at the age of 42 cut short the dynamic and evolving career path of a unique American painter.

Much of his work shares a close kinship with that of Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent but with a more expressive, modernist edge, especially in his later work. At any rate, any plein air painter will find much unconventional inspiration in the pages of this handsome volume.

– Carl Judson

Haverstock, Mary Sayre, George Bellows: An Artist in Action London, 2007, 160 pages, 11 ½ x 10, hardcover.

Ferdinand Kaufmann (1864-1942)

When I was growing up in Denver, I was always drawn to these two little boat paintings by Ferdinand Kaufmann when I would see them in my grandparents’ apartment. The foggy colors and subtle values expressed the hazy California climate, so different from high, dry Colorado (the paintings always made me think of California because my grandparents had lived there, but, looking at Kaufmann's bio, I realize they could have been painted on the east coast). I had never seen mossy pilings or deep, still water like that, but these 12”x16” plein-air oils gave an accurate impression, and I realized, Hmm...it’s a big world out there.

It certainly was a big world for Ferdinand Kaufmann. He was born in Oberhausen, Germany, immigrated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a teenager, then went to Paris where he studied with Laurens, Bouguereau and Constant at the Julien Academy, and with Manet. He returned to Pittsburgh after six years in Europe, and painted plein-air in New England, New Mexico, Arizona and California. He became well known for landscapes, coastal vistas, figure studies and ship paintings. In 1921, he bought a home in Pasadena and later a studio-home in Laguna Beach. He remained active until his death in 1942.

– Sarah Judson

References:
www.askart.com
www.derusfinearts.com

Frederic Fiebig - 1885 - 1953

A very much overlooked plein air painter in the history of 20th century art, Latvian born Frederic Fiebig studied in St. Petersburg and at the Julian Academy in Paris. His work was well received in Paris where he exhibited alongside other well known avant-garde painters during the pre-World War I years. Despite this and periodic successes thereafter, his life was mostly a downward spiral of isolation, misfortune and poverty culminating in a hermit-like existence in the mountains of Alsace before his health broke during World War II.

Fiebig was a painter of integrity, following a unique path of absolute individuality far from convention. “The tragic terms of his miserable life never compromised his art.” 1. His distinctive style of the 20s and 30s was expressed in tiny (as small as 3” x 5”) jewel-like plein air paintings done on paper with a palette knife. Although these are objective paintings, they have an underlying structure of triangular forms evocative of Cezanne and cubism. The painting shown is View of Rodern from a Mountain, 1934, oil on gray wove paper, 6 ¾” x 5 ½”.

- Carl Judson

References:

1. Kashey, Elizabeth, Frederic Fiebig St. Petersburg-Paris-Alsace: Fall Exhibition 1990 Shepard Gallery. New York, 1990

http://www.fredericfiebig.com:82

Dwight William Tyron 1849-1925

Dwight William Tyron considered a series of more than 20 small pastel seascapes (~ 8” x 12”) painted in the autumn of 1915, which he called “Sea Phrases” or “Sea Moods”, among his best work. When you look at these, that these are probably not, strictly speaking, plein air paintings is hard to believe – especially since they are so evocative of the composition and subject matter of Whistler’s plein air pochade box paintings of the 1880s and 1890s. (see "Afternoon Clouds" on left)

Whistler had a strong influence on Tryon and they shared a patron, Charles Lang Freer, the Detroit industrialist, who had made his fortune building railroad cars before becoming one of the most astute American collectors of art in the early 20th Century. Not surprisingly, the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian houses the largest collection of Tryon’s work.

Tryon was a passionate lover of the outdoors and a meticulous observer of the New England landscape (and seascape). He had rigorously trained himself to commit his observations to memory and then to render them in paint later. This carefully honed skill particularly allowed him to record fleeting effects of dawn and dusk with great veracity. Although his paintings are almost all studio paintings, done from memory and pencil notes on little scraps of paper, they give a sense of immediacy and direct observation characteristic of plein air paintings by an artist who has really “seen” the subject.

- Carl Judson

Merrill, Linda, An Ideal Country: Paintings by Dwight William Tryon in the Freer Gallery of Art. Smithsonian Institution, 1990, Hardcover, 10 ¾ x 10 ¼, 200 pages, 80 color plates.

"The Talisman"

“The Talisman,” an exquisite small plein-air landscape by Paul Serusier, marked a turning point in art history. Painted in 1888 on an 11”x9” wooden panel in colors almost straight out of the tube, this single painting became an inspiration to a generation of Post-Impressionists.

Born in Paris in 1864, Paul Serusier studied classical philosophy, Greek, Latin, and the sciences and began his art training at the Julian Academy in 1885. From there, he went to Pont-Aven in Brittany, a town popular among artists (both French and foreign). Just before he went back to Paris, Serusier decided to show one of his paintings to the well-known Paul Gauguin, who had spent much of his childhood in Peru and had no academic art training. He encouraged Serusier to free himself from the constraints of imitative painting, to use pure colors and exaggerate his impressions, giving the painting its own logic. Returning to Paris, Serusier carried a small painting he had made following Gauguin’s advice, which became known as “The Talisman,” and began sharing the new ideas with his friends at the Academy - Bonnard, Denis, and Ranson.

Serusier named his group, which later included Vuillard and Roussel, “The Nabis” (Hebrew for “The Prophets”). In their departure from linear perspective and modeling, they had an affinity with Japanese prints, Italian primitives and contemporary graphic posters on the streets of Paris. Denis defined their view of painting as “basically a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order,” which put the emphasis on the two-dimensional, “decorative” use of the visible world (in French, the concept doesn’t imply triviality, but rather work that is personal, evocative and even spiritually significant).

The Nabis disbanded in 1899, but they had created a link between the remote past (medieval tapestries and frescoes), distant places (Japan & Africa) and the future (Matisse and Picasso) as well as between fine art and applied design (theatre sets and Art Nouveau)... and all because of that one little plein-air painting.

– Sarah Judson

References:

Ellridge, Arthur, Gauguin and the Nabis, Terrail, 1995
http://www.metmuseum.org/
http://www.abcgallery.com/

James Abbott McNeill Whistler – 1834-1903

Born in America and educated at West Point, James McNeill Whistler was an expatriate living in Europe his entire adult life. He was a legendary character, cynic and artistic revolutionary in Victorian London (and Paris), counting among his friends Monet, Degas and Rodin. Whistler was a real “painter’s painter, whose ideas and work influenced many leading painters of his day including John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase.

Of course, he was best known for his portraits, particularly Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother (“Whistler’s Mother”). His mature work, the lesser known small plein air paintings, anticipated abstraction and shocked his Victorian audience at least as much, if not more than, his outrageous behavior.

These small pochade box oil paintings (some of my all-time favorites), done on wooden panels, are about 5” x 9” in size. The paint application is fluid and the brushwork deliberate, deft, direct and spare. For such a flamboyant personality these remarkably modest and unassuming little paintings stand in stark contrast.

Fortunately for us in America, Charles Lang Freer, a Detroit industrialist, became Whistler’s most important collector. Consequently most of these little gems are in the collection of the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian.

- Carl Judson

References –

Whistler: Landscapes and Seascapes Donaly Holden, Watson-Guptill, New York, 1976, 88 Pages, 11x10 1/4, 32 color plates, paperback

Winston Churchill - Plein Air Painter

When Winston Churchill, during World War I, took the fall for the Gallipoli fiasco and resigned his post as the youngest ever First Lord of the Admiralty, he went to the trenches in France in 1915 and took a paint box with him. Thus began his painting career at age 40. Over the next 40+ years he painted over 500 very creditable paintings. Among his memorable quotes on the subject of painting is “When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting.”

Recognized for his “bold and joyous brush”, he quickly transcended amateur status and became an accomplished painter. He frequently painted large format plein air paintings as a break from his stressful life. His compelling essay “Painting as a Pastime,” in which he extols the contemplative virtues of painting for the overworked, is a classic. He is reputed to have entered art exhibits of some note anonymously and taken prizes.

An extensive collection of his work is to be found at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where he gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946. A visit to the Churchill museum at Westminster College will be rewarded by the additional bonus of a fully restored Christopher Wren church moved from London after the war.

– Carl Judson