Kevin Macpherson is one of the country’s leading plein air painters and is highly respected among his fellow artists and collectors. Steeped in the American Impressionist tradition, his oil paintings are distinguished by their broad strokes and classic use of color and layering. He is a master of the art of painting outdoors directly from nature, en plein air.

Born in New Jersey, Kevin Macpherson studied at the Northern Arizona University where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1978. He also took numerous classes at the Scottsdale Artists’ School. After years as a successful freelance illustrator in Phoenix, Arizona, Kevin moved to New Mexico to pursue his goals as a fine artist. His home in the mountains east of Taos is the starting point for his frequent worldwide travels.

Along with winning countless Best of Show awards, his paintings have influenced many feature articles in Art of the West, Art Talk, and graced the covers of Southwest Art, American Artist and the Artist’s Magazine. Kevin is a sought after workshop teacher here and abroad, his classes filling years in advance. He is the author of “Fill your Oil Paintings with Light and Color” which, now in its third printing, has become a best seller for North Light Books. Kevin’s bimonthly column, “The Artist’s Voice”, is featured in Southwest Art Magazine. His leadership as President of Plein Air Painters of America has brought the organization to the forefront of representational painting. Kevin is the first artist in the Oil Painters of America to be elevated from Signature Member status to that of Honorary Master Signature Member.

Kevin Macpherson has lived a life beyond his wildest dreams because he followed his muse. Paints in hand, he has globe-trotted to over thirty-five countries and counting. Art is his mistress as he travels in search of inspiration. His colorful, compelling oils cross international borders, speaking with the universal language of color. Kevin is a gifted teacher with keen intellect who has influenced thousands of aspiring artists. Through years of writing and teaching, he has crystallized his thoughts into a simple, direct, and highly effective painting method. Kevin can teach anyone to see and paint this visual language. If you have had the pleasure of studying with him, you know his youthful enthusiasm and intense curiosity are contagious.

Kevin is recognized as one of America’s most accomplished Impressionistic plein air painters. His discipline and dedication have earned him critical success and numerous awards for his artwork. He is a member of many top organizations and has been recognized for his accomplishments and influence, including Master Oil Painters of America, Master American Impressionists Society, Master member California Art Club, member of the Salmagundi Club and Founding member and first president of the Plein Air Painters of America.

His work has been featured in more than 75 publications, books, television series and video. In addition to writing three popular books on landscape painting he has established stimulating artistic adventures. These include international venues and opportunities such as Chateau des Arts, En Plein Air Masters, Brush with Life and Artist’s Mentor Online and the television series, Passport and Palette.

Throughout his career he has devoted significant energy nurturing the next generation. Today finds him more energized, bringing art and joy to the aspiring hearts of underprivileged children especially in Central America and China with his foundation, “Art Ambassador for a Colorful World,” artambassador.org.

Kevin’s story is still being written.

William Lees Judson was born in Manchester England and came to the United States with his family in 1852, living in Brooklyn, New York. His early arts education was from his father who was an artist. Judson served in the military during the Civil War and afterwards studied briefly with John B. Irving (1872-73) in New York. He went to Paris and studied at the Academie Julian from 1878 to 1881.

Around 1890 Judson moved to Chicago where he was active as a portrait painter. Ill health caused him to seek a milder climate, and, in 1893, he came to Los Angeles. He taught at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and began to paint the landscape.

In 1896 he joined the faculty of the University of Southern California as Professor of Drawing and Painting. In 1901 he founded and was made the first dean of the USC College of Fine Arts located on the Arroyo Seco in Garvanza. A fire destroyed the school in December 1910, and it was reported that Judson lost many paintings. The school was immediately rebuilt and Judson continued in his post for the rest of his life.

Judson was a versatile artist. An adept impressionist painter, he was also originator of the Craftsman movement in the Arroyo Seco area of Pasadena. The tradition endured, and the Judson Studios still produce excellent stained-glass windows in the original Judson home in Pasadena.

Judson was a member of the California Art Club and the Laguna Beach Art Association. Judson held exhibitions at the California Midwinter Exposition, 1894 and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1918.

His awards include a bronze medal at a London exhibition in 1886, a bronze medal at the Panama California Exposition in San Diego in 1915, and the Popular Prize at the Southwest Museum in 1921.

Frank Townsend Hutchens was the son of Hiram L. and Mary A. Hutchens of Canandaigua, New York, an upstate town in the Finger Lakes region twenty-five miles southeast of Rochester. Hutchens was educated locally at the Canandaigua Academy. In the early 1890s he studied art in New York City with Frank DuMond, George DeForest Brush and Irving Wiles, who were all instructors at the Art Students League. (It is likely that Hutchens was a student at the League, although his name does not appear in its student register.) Following a popular career trajectory, Hutchens went on to Paris to continue his art education. In 1895-96, he enrolled at the Academie Julian, a favorite school with Americans in the French capital. His teachers there, Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845-1902) and Jean Paul Laurens (1838-1921), were both academic history and figure painters. He also studied at the Academie Colarossi, a less formal institution. Hutchens showed works at the Paris salon in 1896 and 1898. He also began to exhibit at home, sending a watercolor of a garden in Florence, Italy, to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1897 and an Italian scene to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1896-97. His Paris Salon works, judging by their titles, appear to have been genre works.

Hutchens returned to America sometime in the late 1890s. He married Mabel Reynolds in 1900. In the early years of the twentieth century, Hutchens undertook an energetic program of exhibiting his work at academy shows and commercial galleries. Beginning in 1905, his major venue was the National Academy of Design, New York, participating in the annual exhibitions of 1905-06, 1908, 1910-12, 1914, 1916-20, 1922-23, and 1930-31. Hutchens was a versatile painter in both oil and watercolor. He quickly moved away from genre to make a specialty of landscapes, but also developed a successful practice as a portrait painter. Hutchens cultivated a presence in the Midwest, exhibiting at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1897 and from 1905 to 1915. In 1912, he was featured in a one-man show at the John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis, Indiana, entitled An Exhibition of Recent Paintings. In addition he showed in the Carnegie International (1905 and sporadically through 1930); at the Corcoran Museum of Art (1914, 1916, 1919, 1937); the Society of Independent Artists (1917); the Boston Art Club (1899, 1906, 1908); and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1986, 1906, 1909, 1922, 1926).

In 1908, Hutchens had a show at Fishel, Adler & Schwartz Gallery in New York where he showed genre paintings of Dutch and French subjects, including at least one pastel. According to the notice of the show in the New York Times (Dec. 19, 1908), he had also exhibited an oil painting at the International Exhibition of living Masters in Amsterdam in 1907, as well as the Royal Academy, London (1908). In 1916, Hutchens had an exhibition at the Reinhardt Galleries, New York which included paintings and sketches. In 1920, he showed twenty-one pictures at the Howard Young Gallery, New York. In connection with that show, the art critic for the New York Times described the artist as “an ingratiating interpreter of gentle scenes (Feb. 8, 1920, pg. SM5). In 1922, Hutchens exhibited at the Babcock Galleries, New York, a show which featured a noteworthy painting of breakfast on the porch of his Connecticut home. In 1923, Hutchens was listed as a member of the Board of Control of the Aquarellists, a society of watercolorists pledged to promote the medium. In 1930, Hutchens had a show of forty portraits and landscapes at the Yorke Gallery in New York.

Early in the new century, Hutchens and his wife moved to rural Connecticut where Hutchens became an early member of the Silvermine artists’ colony. In 1909, Hutchens purchased the so-called Old Mill for $12,500 at auction. He commissioned a restoration and renovation and used it for the rest of his life as studio and home. Hutchens thereafter showed regularly in Silvermine group shows as well as mounting exhibitions at his own scenic home, which he rechristened, the Red Mill. By 1931 Hutchens had begun to go to Taos, New Mexico, where he also maintained a residence. A circumstantial account of Hutchens’ travels can be pieced together from the titles of pictures he exhibited. In 1931, for example, he showed Taos pictures including figure studies of American Indians at his mill house in Connecticut.

By the 1930s, Hutchens was in his seventh decade. He continued to show in New York, sending Indian Drummer to the Allied Artists of America show in New York in 1932, and in the same year, exhibiting American Indian subjects at the Women’s City Club. Mabel Hutchens died in 1932. Hutchens continued to travel to New Mexico and Florida, while retaining his residence in Connecticut. In 1936, he participated in the group show at The Slivermine Guild of Artists and had a one-man show at his home and studio as well where he showed oils and watercolors ranging from the French Riviera and Africa to Taos and the West Coast. (New York Times, July 19, 1936, pg. X7).

Hutchens painted portraits throughout his career. In 1912, he produced an official portrait of Governor Charles Floyd (1861-1923, served 1907-09) of New Hampshire. Twenty years later he painted Patrick Jay Hurley, a member of the Choctaw Nation who served as Secretary of War from 1929 until 1933, and later as American Ambassador to New Zealand. Hurley had seen Hutchens’ work exhibited in Taos. The Florida portrait commissions took up the final years of the artist’s life.

Hutchens and his wife are buried in the Hutchens’ family plot in Woodlawn Cemetery in the artist’s native Canandaigua. The artist and his wife appear to have been childless, leaving no one to continue to call attention to his achievements. The time is ripe now, for a rediscovery of this creator of delight-filled landscapes and garden scenes.

MUSEUMS that include this artist in their collection. New Orleans Museum of Art ,
Syracuse University Art Collection, The Toledo Museum of Art, Butler Institute of American Art , Milwaukee Art Museum, The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts

Gregory Hull is one of America’s genuine leaders in the field of contemporary realism, whose versatility and variety in subject matter are brilliantly displayed in his outstanding works. His relentless pursuit of scenic locations has taken him from the high peaks of the Sierras of California to the depths of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and has allowed him to vividly capture the magnificence of nature on canvas. His brushstrokes are fluid, bold and expressive, becoming the vehicle for the study of light, the subject of all his paintings.

Hull earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree and a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Utah where he met Alvin Gittins, an Academy-trained portraitist whose approach to art deeply influenced him. This philosophy of drawing and painting from life, and the study of human anatomy, gave him a solid foundation upon which he has achieved widespread acclaim.

Gregory Hull’s list of awards is long and impressive. Also, he has completed major commissions for Nestlé USA, the Kierland Westin Hotel and Spa, and the Meadows Del Mar Resort in addition to several important portrait commissions. He is represented in many significant private and public collections worldwide. Hull’s painting “Yosemite Winter” was chosen to be included in the Top 100 paintings for the 2001 Arts for the Parks exhibition.

Gregory Hull has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at the Redfern Gallery in Laguna Beach; Wally Findlay Galleries in Chicago, New York and Palm Beach; the John Pence Gallery in San Francisco, and the Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson and Santa Fe.

BORN
Okmulgee, Oklahoma, 1950.
Has lived in Utah, Spain, Pennsylvania, California, and since 1981 in Arizona. Professional artist since 1978.

EDUCATION
1977 Master of Fine Arts Degree, University of Utah.
1973 Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree, University of Utah.

Landscape painter. Born in Brentford, Middlesex, England on Feb. 2, 1889. Harris immigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1904 and settled in Los Angeles. As a teenager he attended evening classes at the local Artists’ Student League and Cannon Art School under Hanson Puthuff, Will Foster, Lawrence Murphy, F. Tolles Chamberlin and Stanton MacDonald-Wright. He worked in commercial art throughout his career and taught at Chouinard Art School for many years. In 1950 Harris brought Jack Wilkinson Smith’s old studio in Alhambra and lived there for the rest of his life. The harbor at San Pedro was one of his favorite painting spots. His early paintings (1920-40) show the influence of his teacher and sketching partner Hanson Puthuff and are bathed in light and atmospheric effects. His late paintings are mostly desert scenes done on sketching trips with Swinnerton and are bolder, with a palette of reds, yellows, and greens. Harris won over 100 awards in Southern California exhibitions from 1936 until his death on May 30, 1977.

Member: American Institute of Fine Art; Artists of the South West: California Art Club; Painters & Sculptors of Los Angeles; San Fernando Art Association; San Gabriel Artisits’ Guild; San Gabriel Fine Art Association; Whittier Art Association, Laguna Beach Art Association; Pasadena Society of Artists.

Works Held: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Laguna Beach Museum, The Irvine Museum.

Born in Morristown, NJ on Nov. 25, 1863. Gamble’s father worked for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and when John was a teenager he moved with his family to Auckland, New Zealand. At age 20 he moved to San Francisco and began art training at the School of Design under Virgil Williams and Emil Carlsen. After further training in Paris at Academie Julian under Jean Paul Laurens and Benjamin-Constant, he returned to San Francisco and opened a studio. When his studio and most of the city went up in flames in 1906, he relocated to Santa Barbara and remained there for the rest of his life. Gamble did no commercial art work and earned his living throughout his career from the sale of his paintings. For 25 years he served as color consultant for the Santa Barbara Board of Architectural Review. Nationally known for his landscapes, his paintings often include poppies, lupine, and other wild flowers against the greens and purples of the California hills.

Member: San Francisco Art Association; Santa Barbara Art Association; American Federation of Arts; Foundation of Western Artists.

Exhibited: California Midwinter International Expo, 1894; Mark Hopkins Institute, 1898, 1906; Alaska-Yukon Expo, Seattle, 1909 (gold medal); San Francisco Art Association, 1916; Stendahl Galleries, LA, 1938; Golden Gate International Exposition, 1939.

Works Held: California Historical Society; Irvine Museum; Oakland Museum; Crocker Museum, Sacramento; Shasta State Park; Museum of Art, Auckland, New Zealand; Fox Arlington Theater, Santa Barbara (murals).

Known as the intellectual and artistic leader of the California watercolor artists, Phil Dike was strongly influenced by avant garde painters Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, and Charles Burchfield. Born in Redlands, California Dike began his art education at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1924, later continuing at the Art Students League in New York with Frank DuMond and George Luks. He traveled throughout Europe and studied for a year in France at the American Academy of Fontainebleau and exhibited at that time at the Paris Salon.

Dike returned to Los Angeles where he taught at Chouinard’s for twenty years and also worked in the fine art department of Walt Disney Studios where he worked on animated classics including “Fantasia” and “Snow White” and was the first artist to put color into Disney animations. From 1950 to 1971, he was an esteemed member of the faculty of Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School.

Phil Dike’s work can be found at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio and the Pasadena Art Institute in California.

A perceptive observer of his environment, Terry DeLapp is a modern-day Tonalist, recognized for his evocative depictions of the central coast of California. His choice of motifs–the farms and ranches of the Salinas and San Joaquin valleys, the green hills of Cambria and San Simeon, and the luxuriant flora of the region–reveals, as he puts it, his “love and concern for the land and what is on it.”

Born in Pasadena in 1934, DeLapp studied at the Chouinards Art Academy in Hollywood and at the University of California. From 1959 to 1992 he operated the Terry DeLapp Gallery in Los Angeles, the first gallery on the West coast to showcase nineteenth-century American art.

DeLapp currently lives and works in Cambria, California. He has been exhibiting his paintings since the early 1980s, participating in group shows in California, New Mexico and elsewhere. DeLapp has had numerous solo exhibitions as well, at the Bakersfield Museum of Art . His paintings can be found at the San Diego Museum of Art, and in many private collections, including those of Steve Martin, Martin Mull, Joan Rivers, Julian Ganz, and Martin Short.

Painter. Born Wilmos Bela Sandorhaji at his family estate in Sandorhaji, Hungary in 1882. Darling studied art for eight years at the Royal Academy of Budapest followed by further study in Paris at Ecole des Beaux-Arts. After immigrating to the U.S. in 1910, he established a reputation as a portrait painter in New York City. At the beginning of WWI, he settled in Los Angeles and, due to anti-German sentiment, changed his Hungarian name to William S. Darling. He then began a thirty-year career as supervising art director for 20th Century Fox Studios, winning three Oscars and several nominations for his settings.

During his leisure he began painting landscapes en plein air as well as nocturnal cowboy and Indian scenes à la Frank Tenney Johnson. Darling maintained homes in Palm Springs and Laguna Beach where he derived much of his subject matter. He also made many painting forays into the Southwest. He died in Laguna Beach on December 15, 1963.

Member : Laguna Beach Art Association (President); Desert Art Center, Palm Springs (President).

Exhibited : Laguna Festival of Arts annuals.

Works held : National Gallery, Hungary (self portrait).

Source : Hughes, Artists of California, 134.

Painter. Born in Brooklyn, NY on August 23 1871. At a young age he was drawn to the arts, both music and painting–especially the seascapes of William Trost Richards (1883-1905) who he eventually studied with in Philadelphia. He also studied at the Art Students League and the Cooper Union art School in New York. He went on to study both music and art in Munich with Karl Raupp (1837-1918), in Paris at the Academie Julian and in Leipzig in 1905.

Returning to the United States, Cuprien taught for five years at Baylor University in Texas. His love of painting and the sea lured him to Southern California in 1912. He lived briefly on Catalina Island and then eventually settled in Laguna Beach where he remained for the rest of his life. He became an integral and popular member of the community for three decades. On a bluff overlooking the ocean, he built a home and studio which he named “The Viking.” It became a bohemian gathering spot where he loved to entertain friends and fellow artists with piano recitals and exhibitions of his paintings. His estate was bequeathed to the Laguna Beach Art Association, of which he was founding member. Cuprien is best known for his marine and coastal scenes.

Member : California Art Club; Laguna Beach Art Association (President 1921-22); Leipzig Art Association; Dallas Art Association; Denver Art Association; Southern States Art league; New Haven Palette and Chisel Club; Painters and Sculptors of Los Angeles.

Exhibited : Berliner Ausstellung (gold); Galveston, Texas, 1913 (medal); San Diego Exposition, 1915 (medal), 1916 (medal); California State Fair, 1918 (medal), 1920 (prize); Phoenix (AZ) State Fair,1916 (prize); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1918 (solo); Laguna Beach Art Association, annuals, 1921 (prize); Witte Memorial Museum, 1929 (prize); Laguna Beach Museum, 1939-45; Pacific Southwest Exposition, Long Beach (prize); Society of Independent Artists.

Works held : Bowers Museum, Santa Ana; del Vecchio Gallery, Leipzig; Laguna Beach Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Springville (Utah) Museum of Art; Chamber of Commerce Laguna Beach.

Sources : WW47; Hughes, Artists of California, 128; Peggy and Harold Samuels, 118.