Recognized as one of California’s leading landscape artists, Payne’s work will always assure him a favored place in the history of American Impressionism.  He is internationally renowned for his depictions of the High Sierras, Indians riding through desert canyons, landscapes of the Sierra Nevada and French and Italian boat scenes as well as authoring a book titled Composition of Outdoor Painting.

Born in Washburn, Missouri, Edgar Payne, like many artists, felt so strongly called by art that at age fourteen he ran away from home to pursue a career forbidden by his father.  He earned money painting houses, stage sets and murals, and traveled through the Ozarks, Texas, Mexico and Chicago.

He was self-taught except for a brief period at the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, he was active with the Chicago Society of Artists and the Alumni Association of the Art Institute.

In 1909, he first visited California and painted scenes of Laguna Beach and San Francisco. During this time he discovered the beauty of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where he returned continually throughout his career for the inspiration that led to his signature paintings and a turning from murals and stage sets to landscape painting.

While in San Francisco he met artist Elsie Palmer whom he married in Chicago in 1912. In 1916, the Santa Fe Railroad commissioned him to paint the Southwest, and the couple spent four months in Canyon de Chelly.  In 1917 he returned to Glendale, CA with a commission from Chicago’s Congress Hotel for a mural of 11,000 square yards of muslin which was accomplished with the help of other local artists and installed shortly thereafter. The Payne’s also traveled and sketched the Grand Canyon and scenes of New Mexico. In 1918 they established a home and studio in Laguna Beach where he organized and became the first president of the local art association. He continued painting and exhibiting in Los Angeles and Laguna until 1922 when he and Elsie began a two-year painting tour of Europe. There, in 1923 at the Paris Salon, Payne won an Honorable Mention, which was significant recognition because more than 7000 paintings were exhibited. During the next eight years their winter residence was mainly in and around NYC. They had planned to build a house there, but did not start the project because of the economy. During the Depression, Payne took teaching jobs to earn money for him and his family. He also wrote his book on his art theories and techniques – "Composition of Outdoor Painting", which was published in 1941. With many printings, it has been a popular guide to landscape painting and is still as valid today as it was then. They traveled from coast to coast in the U.S. until 1932 when they returned to Hollywood and the following year separated.

 

Payne produced a color motion picture called "Sierra Journey" and Payne Lake in the High Sierra is named for him. He never had enjoyed great health and on April 8, 1947, after a six-month illness, he died of cancer. After his death, his wife Elsie promoted Edgar’s work through museum exhibitions and commercial galleries. There never was a period in which people forgot the name of Edgar Payne or did not collect his work. 

 

Member: Salmagundi Club (NYC); Laguna Beach AA (founding member and first president, 1918); Calif. Art Club (pres. 1926); Chicago Society of Artists; AAPL; Carmel AA. Exhibited: Palette & Chisel Club, 1913; Calif. State Fairs, 1917, 1918 (medals); Ten Painters of LA, 1919; LACMA, 1919 (solo); AIC, 1920 (prize); Southwest Museum (LA), 1921 (prize); Paris Salon, 1923; NAD, 1929 (prize); GGIE, 1939; Calif. Art Club, 1947 (prize). In: NAD; NMAA; AIC; Orange Co. (CA) Museum; Irvine (CA) Museum; Chicago Museum; Indianapolis Museum; Bancroft Library (UC Berkeley); Pasadena Art Inst.; Pasadena Museum; Southwest Museum (LA); Springville (UT) Museum; Fleischer Museum (Scottsdale); Oakland Museum.

 

Source: Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"; Goldfield, “Edgar Payne” 1882-1947.

 

Walt Gonske was born and raised in Irvington, New Jersey. After graduating from the Newark School of Fine Arts, he studied with the famous illustrator, Frank Reilly, and at the Art Students League in New York. Gonske was a successful commercial illustrator, specializing in men’s fashion.

In 1971, Gonske went to visit his sister to Taos, New Mexico. He liked the art, and the idea of painting landscape. In February, 1972, at the age of 29, Gonske moved to Taos to pursue a career in fine art.

He began by painting watercolors from photographs. Though he still works with watercolor from time to time, the intensity of color and light in New Mexico has led him to shift to oils and to working outdoors. His plein-air paintings are a direct result of his emotional response to his subject. He writes, “My goal in the work is not to show what I know, but what I feel.” Gonske’s technique is direct and bold, resulting in dynamic compositions, infused with intense color and light. Gonske interprets nature through his paintings; he does not attempt to reproduce it.

With no favorite colors, Gonske uses a wide palette to capture the sky, trees and streams as they exist in our most vivid memories.His landscapes are not limited to the environs of Taos; he has painted the the scenery, market scenes and churches of Mexico, Portugal, Italy, Guatemala and China.

Gonske has received numerous awards for his paintings, including first prize from the Southwestern Watercolor Society, the gold and silver medals for oil painting from the National Academy of Western Art, and the bronze medal for drawing from that organization. His paintings are included in museums around the country, including the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western Art, the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center.

Source:
Nedra Matteucci Galleries, representing Walt Gonske

Nicolai Fechin was born in Kazan, Russia, on November 26, 1881. His father, Ivan Alexandrovich Fechin, was a woodcarver who travelled in search of work. He learned to carve, and began drawing images of altars for his father to carve. Fechin often drew at night, though the light bothered his father. After several patient requests, his father would get out of bed, grab little Fechin by the scruff of the neck, and drop him in his bed.

At the age of 13, Fechin won his first prize money, and his parents sent him to the Kazan School of Fine Art. A natural talent, Fechin began to show his genius early. He went on to study with Ilya Repin at the Imperial Academy of Art in St. Petersburg. Repin taught Fechin mastakhi, a technique that involves using a palette knife. This application of paint preserves the visibility of the base layers, and allows color to build rather than mix. It is evident in much of Fechin’s work after 1905, and it is part of what made him famous.

After 13 years of schooling, Fechin travelled through Europe, and then taught at the Imperial Academy. He won the Prix de Rome for his painting, Bearing off the Bride, which brought him international recognition. In 1913, he married sixteen year-old Alexandra Belkovich, the daughter of his superior. Their daughter, Eya, was born a year later. Fechin painted many remarkable portraits of his wife and, especially, his daughter. When Fechin and his wife divorced, in 1933, Eya lived with her father most of the time.

The family had migrated to New York in 1923, shortly after the Russian Revolution. In New York, Fechin became a celebrity overnight. However, he developed tuberculosis, and doctors advised him to move west. In 1927, he settled in Taos, New Mexico. He painted Native Americans, and the mountains, and grew very affectionate toward the area. In 1981, his daughter Eya founded the Fechin Institute in Taos, His former home is now a house museum, and the Taos Art Museum.

After the divorce, Fechin went to New York, and then settled in Santa Monica. He died there in 1955, and, years later, Eya took his remains back to Russia. He is a well-loved artist on both continents.

Source: Fenn, Forrest, The Genius of Nicolai Fechin. Santa Fe: One Horse Land & Cattle Company and Nedra Matteucci Galleries, 2001.

Gene Kloss was born Alice Geneva Glasier in 1903, in Oakland, California. At that time, the area was still uncluttered by billboards, lights, and bridges, but oaks still grew around the city. Kloss graduated from Berkeley in 1924. Her instructor, Perham Nahl, was astonished by her first print, and predicted that she would be an etcher. She continued to study at the San Francisco School of Fine Arts, and in 1925, married Phillips Kloss, a writer. She changed her name, for simplicity, and because she believed that a less feminine name would serve her better in the art world.

The couple ventured west on their honeymoon. They entered New Mexico at sunset, and fell in love with the bare, beautiful, vast landscape. From that day forth, Gene Kloss said she considered herself a New Mexican. The couple established dual residence in Berkeley and Taos, and commuted each year. In Taos, they rented an old adobe house for ten dollars a month, for a decade. They cooked on a wood-burning stove, and carried water from a spring, a mile up the canyon. In the desert, Gene Kloss made prints with a secondhand Sturges etching press, weighing 1,200 pounds.

The couple kept their residence in California to care for their elderly mothers. When their two mothers died in 1965, they moved to Colorado, with the press in tow. They bought four acres above the Gunnison river. Eventually, due to allergies and gnats, they returned to their final home in Taos.

Kloss was not concerned with trends, or the financial value of art. Instead, she focused on creating beautiful depictions of the scenes she loved. She was an accomplished oil and watercolor painter, but her prints defined her career. Southwestern scenes, particularly of New Mexico, are common. Her work often contains a hidden light source, with long, sinewy shadows. Her etchings are unique and dramatic, containing high contrast as well as subtlety. During her 60 year career, Kloss created more than 600 prints.

Kloss is considered one of the most important artists of her time, as well as one of the major printmakers of the 20th century. Her work is found in many permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and the Carnegie Institute.

Source: Kloss, Phillips, Gene Kloss Etchings. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2000.

Frederick Childe Hassam was born in 1859 in Dorchester, a small suburb of Boston. Here Hassam experienced a pleasurable mid-century upbringing until his father, Frederick Fitch Hassam underwent a financial collapse with his merchant business. This forced Hassam to leave high school at age 17 in search of employment. He first found himself doing financial work for Little Brown and Co Publishing. Quickly, Hassam realized that finance was not his calling. He was let go, and advised by his supervisor to consider a career in arts since he spent all of his time drawing.

As one door closed the rest of the world opened for Hassam. He began working for George E. Johnson, a wood engraver in Boston. In 1882, after two years of training, Hassam moved to Boston and began exhibiting his artwork.

In 1883, Hassam met Celia Thaxter, who became an important and influential friend and mentor. Thaxter suggested Hassam neglect his first name of Frederick, and go by his middle name of Childe. Hassam made frequent visits to Thaxter’s estate on Appledore Island in Maine. Hassam painted extensively from Thaxter’s garden in the plein air style throughout his career. Hassam’s desire for further education and experience resulted in multiple trips to Europe. The French Barbizon school painters were of great influence.

Source: Adelson, Warren, Jay E. Cantor, and William H. Gerdts. Childe Hassam: Impressionist. New York: Abbeville Publishing Group, 1999.

When Marion Kavanaugh married Elmer Wachtel in 1904 she stopped painting in oils and took up watercolors. Since Kavanaugh and Wachtel were happy artist companions who often painted the same scenes, it made sense to work in different media, and Kavanaugh was assuredly a fine watercolorist. Whether or not marriage sidetracked Marion Wachtel’s painting career, she was never derailed, and she returned to oil painting after Elmer’s death.

The Wachtels’ marriage of twenty-five years was filled with extensive travel, by horse, on foot, and in a custom-designed and –equipped automobile, throughout Southern California, the high Sierra, and the Southwest.

Marion Wachtel exhibited widely – with two one-woman shows at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art – and received several prizes from the Pasadena Society of Artists. She was the only woman artist included in The Ten Painters Club of California, established in 1919 as the “foremost Painters of the West.”

Pedro de Lemos, director of the Stanford University Museum and Art Galleries, best described why Marion Wachtel’s paintings will endure: “Wachtel paints livable pictures. No other artist has created as much romance in California landscape painting as this talented California woman…No California artist has had more of…[her] paintings reproduced in color printings for use in American home decoration than Marion Wachtel.”

Source: “Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945” – Patricia Trenton, editor; Autry Museum of Western Heritage/1995. Illustrated  plate 43, page 54.

            A very early San Francisco Chronicle review of Wachtel’s watercolors, written in 1903 when she was just arrived from Chicago, praised especially her depiction of mountains. The reviewer could have been writing about this painting when he said, “One does not think of watercolor as a medium for the expression of mountains, that seem in their strength and grandeur to stand for the eternal, but Miss Kavanaugh has made a notable success of the venture. In a free, fearless way, more like a man than a woman.”

 

Source: “Superbly Independent/Early California Paintings by Annie Harmon, Mary DeNeale Morgan and Marion Kavanagh Wachtel.” Exhibited:  Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary’s College of California, 2010.

 

   Born in Fresno, CA on Jan. 24, 1875. A sickly child, sketching occupied a lot of Dixon’s time while growing up. As a boy he listened with fascination to the stories of the Old West told by the old timers. It is no wonder that cowboys and Indians were to become the main subject matter of his life’s work. At 16 he sent his sketch book to Frederic Remington who encouraged him to pursue an art career. The Dixon family moved to Alameda, CA in 1893, the year the artist’s first illustration was published in Overland Monthly. Dixon enrolled at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute, but the confines of a classroom were not to his liking and he remained only three months.

In 1895 he took his first full-time job as an illustrator for the San Francisco Morning Call and continued four years later with the Examiner. By 1899 he was making regular sketching trips into the Northwest and Southwest, during which time he was exhibiting regularly with the San Francisco Art Ass’n. In 1905 he married artist Lillian West Tobey. A year later the earthquake and fire destroyed his studio and most of his early works. The Dixons then lived across the Golden Gate in Sausalito until 1907 when he accepted a commission from the Southern Pacific Railroad to paint a mural for their depot in Tucson, AZ. Afterwards he moved to New York where he continued his magazine illustrations.

Upon returning to California in 1912, he abandoned commercial art to concentrate on easel paintings and murals. During the PPIE of 1915 he suffered a nervous breakdown and divorced his wife in 1917. He married photographer Dorothea Lange in 1920. This marriage lasted until 1935 and in 1937 he married artist Edith Hamlin. During the 1930s he did murals and paintings for the WPA. In 1938 ill health forced his move to the drier climate of Tucson, AZ where he spent his last years while maintaining a studio nearby in Mt Carmel, UT. Dixon died in Tucson on Nov. 14, 1946. Today he is internationally famous for his western subjects which he often signed with his logo, an Indian Thunderbird.

Member: SFAA; Salmagundi Club; Architectural League of NY; Bohemian Club; Press Club (SF); Bay Region AA; Oakland AA; Foundation of Western Art (LA); Berkeley Art League; AFA; SW Society; American Artists Congress.

Exhibitions (group): SF Artists Society, 1905; NAD, 1911; PPIE, 1915 (bronze medal); Bohemian Club, 1915, 1922; Painters of the West (LA), 1924-25.

Exhibitions (solo): Vickery, Atkins, & Torrey Gallery (SF), 1914; Oakland Art Gallery, 1919; Gump’s (SF), 1920; Stendahl Gallery (LA), 1921; Macbeth Gallery (NYC), 1923; Galerie Beaux Arts (SF), 1925-32; Mills College (Oakland), 1927; Pasadena Art Museum, 1928; Biltmore Salon (LA), 1928; Haggin Museum (Stockton), 1934; De Young Museum, 1956, 1968; CHS, 1975; Fresno Arts Center, 1975; Calif. Academy of Sciences (SF), 1981.

Murals: Canoga Park (CA) Post Office; Martinez (CA) Post Office; John C. Fremont High School (LA); Main reading room of Sacramento State Library; West Coast Theatre (Oakland); Mark Hopkins Hotel’s Hall of the Dons (done with Frank Van Sloun); Oakland Technical High School; Biltmore Hotel (Phoenix); Dept. of Interior Bldg. (Washington, DC). In: Orange Co. (CA) Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Univ. of Idaho; De Young Museum; Brigham Young Univ.; Mills College (Oakland); Cook Museum (Honolulu); Southwest Museum (LA); Pasadena Art Inst.; Bancroft Library (UC Berkeley); CHS.

Source:Edan Hughes,"Artists in California, 1786-1940"

   Dranga painted in Hawaii for approximately 25 years. She was among a number of visiting and newly resident artists in Hawaii in the early 1900s who wished to express in their art a sense of Island color and culture. Along with Dranga, some of these artists were Theodore Wores, Bessie Wheeler, Hubert Vos, and Matteo Sandona, all part of a general movement to capture on canvas images of Old Hawaii before it disappeared. She became primarily known for her landscapes of Hawaii and portrait depictions of her friends who were Hawaiian and Chinese, many of these works showing notable sensitivity. Flowers were also some of her subjects.

Helen Thomas Dranga was born in Oxford, England in 1866. In 1896 she married Theodore Augustus Dranga. They lived in Oakland, California until 1901 when the couple moved from Oakland to Hilo, Hawaii. There her husband became a merchant and they raised their son, the marine conchologist, Theodore Thomas Dranga (1901-1956). Helen’s husband, Ted, is mentioned in various references about Hawaiian history. He is known to have observed the 1924 explosions of the volcano Kilauea, and is also credited for having discovered the first living specimen of a rare cowry (mollusk), which he found at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu in 1928. In 1929, Theodore T. Dranga is noted in National Park Service records as having made arrangements to repatriate certain Hawaiian cultural items, namely some burial items. These varied details about her husband’s activities may eventually shed additional light on the life of Helen Dranga and the places she may have visited and painted.

1800 to 1940 was considered the ‘golden era’ of Hawaii, and artworks specifically from this period were gathered for the first time in the show ‘Encounters in Paradise’, which was exhibited at the Honolulu Academy of the Arts. Most of the pictures were obtained from museums and private collections, and included works by some of the above named artists, as well as Jules Tavernier, Charles Furneaux, John Kelly, and Hilo-based Helen Dranga.

Helen Dranga’s compositions also regularly appeared as covers of Paradise of the Pacific Magazine throughout the 1920s and 1930s. These magazines themselves have become collectibles. A rare Paradise of the Pacific issue from December 1934 was auctioned around 2002, and its auction description mentioned the issue as particularly notable because it featured paintings by D. Howard Hitchcock, Lionel Walden, and Helen Dranga.

She died in Hilo in 1940 and was buried in San Diego, California.

Dranga was a member of the Hawaiian Society of Artists (Exhibited: 1917). Her works are held in the Lyman House Memorial Museum in Hilo, Hawaii and the Honolulu Academy of the Arts as well as numerous important private collections. Listed In: Forbes and Kunichika, from Hilo 1825-1925 A Century of Painting and Drawings, the catalogue of an exhibit held at the Lyman House Museum, Hilo in 1983-84); Finding Paradise written by Don Severson in association with the Honolulu Academy of Art).

Source: AskART; Wikipedia

William Acheff is of Alaskan Athabascan heritage. He has a particular fondness for historical and ethnic artifacts, which often appear in his work. His paintings convey a sense of nostalgia, and a peaceful, meditative quality.

Though Acheff had always enjoyed painting, he never thought that he would become an artist. He began cutting hair after attending barber college in San Francisco. In 1968, he met the artist Robert Lupetti in the barbershop, and he began taking painting lessons. Encouraged, after several years of training, Acheff began to pursue art as a career.

In 1973, Acheff moved to Taos, out of curiosity regarding the Southwestern art movement. He had his first major show in 1978, and his success was almost immediate. Acheff achieved great distinction among contemporary painters for his masterful technique and original style. His compositions are remarkably contemporary, while serving as a unique homage to the past. Acheff was awarded the Prix de West at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City.