Born in Sheffield, England on May 21, 1838. At age 12 Deakin was apprenticed to a decorative japanning firm where he was taught to paint landscapes on boxes and tables. This appears to have been the extent of his art training and he remained a self-taught artist. A most talented youth, by 18 he was recognized in France and his native England for his architectural paintings.

After moving to America in 1856, Deakin settled in Chicago and soon was exhibiting portraits of Civil War heroes at the Chicago Art Academy. In 1870 he moved to San Francisco, established a studio, and within a few years had gained a fine reputation as a painter while exhibiting regularly with the San Francisco Art Ass’n and at the Mechanics’ Institute Fairs.

He was a member of the Bohemian Club and a close friend of Samuel Brookes with whom he shared a studio. Deakin traveled and sketched in Europe during 1877-79. While there, he produced many paintings of Switzerland and France and exhibited at the Paris Salon. During 1882-83 he occupied a studio in Denver, CO and then returned to San Francisco.

His last years were spent in Berkeley, CA where in 1890 he purchased a large tract of land which was a portion of the old Peralta land grant. He built a Mission-Style studio on the property and remained there until his death on May 11, 1923. Later the property was subdivided and a street named for him there. Having developed an early enthusiasm for ruins and historic architecture, in later years Deakin turned to painting these sharply delineated scenes in a style that was termed "romantic, picturesque, and nostalgic."

Most of his paintings are characterized by the skillful rendering of architectural surfaces. Most famous for his series of mission paintings, from 1879 until the turn of the century he painted two sets in oil and one in watercolor of the 21 missions. His legacy to California also includes skillfully rendered paintings of grapes, Chinatown genre, and scenes of the disaster of 1906.

Exhibited: SFAA, 1872-85; Mechanics’ Inst. (SF), 1875-87; Calif. State Fair, 1876-89; Alaska-Yukon Expo (Seattle), 1909; De Young Museum, 1940; Oakland Museum, 1962, 1971, 1992; Whitney Museum, 1981.

In: De Young Museum (Flaming Tokay); Natural History Museum of LA (missions); Oakland Museum; CHS; Society of Calif. Pioneers; Nevada Museum (Reno); Orange Co. (CA) Museum.

Source: Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940" California Design, 1910; Painters of the Humble Truth; From Frontier to Fire; A Gallery of Calif. Mission Paintings; Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors & Engravers (Fielding, Mantle); Artists of the American West (Doris Dawdy).

     Born in Stow, ME on March 20, 1877, Selden Gile, after attending business college in Maine, moved to California in 1901. He was a payroll master in Lincoln and in Oakland after 1905 for Gladding McBean Company.

His art studies were under Perham Nahl, Frank Van Sloun, Spencer Macky, Wm H. Clapp, and at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Prior to 1914, he painted in the manner of classical California landscape painters such as William Keith. After that time he assumed the palette and style of Impressionism-Fauvism, but remained an "individualist" in his mode of expressing the California scene.

During the 1920s, he became the dominant figure in a group of painters known as the Society of Six. The Six were active in the San Francisco Bay area and exhibited regularly at the Oakland Art Gallery. In 1927 Gile moved across the Golden Gate to Tiburon and, shortly thereafter, to a houseboat in Belvedere. Destitute and an alcoholic, he died at the poor farm in San Rafael, CA on June 8, 1947 and was buried at Mt Tamalpais Cemetery.

Member: Marin County Art Association; Oakland Art League.

Exhibition: San Francisco Art Association, 1916-35; Society of Six, 1923-28; Galerie Beaux Arts (SF), 1928 (solo); California Statewide (Santa Cruz), 1929 (prize); Vallejo Art Guild, 1929 (1st prize); Oakland Art Association, 1933-36; San Francisco Museum of Art Inaugural, 1935; Smithsonian Institution 1976-77; Oakland Museum, 1981.

In: Monterey Peninsula Museum; Oakland Museum; Fleischer Museum (Scottsdale).

Source: Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940" Painters & Sculptors in California: the Modern Era; American Art Annual 1929-33; Who’s Who in American Art 1936-41; Society of Six; Expo to Expo; Monterey: The Artist’s View; A Feast for the Eyes; American Impressionism ; SF Chronicle, 11-10-1984.

William Frederick Ritschel  (1864 – 1949)

Considered one of America’s foremost marine painters, William Ritschel’s presence as a resident artist on the Monterey Peninsula added greatly to the substance and prestige of the California art community.

He was born in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany, and was educated at the Latin and Industrial School in Nuremberg.  As a young man, he roamed the sea as a merchant seaman, and reflected on canvas what he saw and experienced.  He studied at the Royal Academy in Munich as the pupil of F Kaulbach and C Raupp and earned great renown in Europe for his paintings.

In 1895, he immigrated to New York City and from there was nationally recognized for his marine subjects.  He was closely associated with Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Edward Redfield, and Willard Metcalf, and others who were pursuing the Impressionist style of painting.  He joined the Salmagundi Club and the New York Watercolor Society.

Beginning in 1901, he traveled the West including Arizona where he painted The Grand Canyon and scenes of Navajo country.  In 1911 he settled in Carmel, CA while continuing to exhibit on the East Coast and in Europe.

An active exhibitor in the major galleries, art associations, and expositions throughout California and the United States, Ritschel also received international acclaim in his time. Awarded the Carnegie Prize in 1913 at the National Academy of Design in New York, he was elected a full membership the following year. Already exhibiting in California for several years, Ritschel was awarded a gold medal at San Francisco’s 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

In 1918 Ritschel began building his permanent studio-home "Castle a Mare", perched atop the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, on a site located just below the present-day Carmel Highlands Inn. From here, Ritschel’s inspiration was at his doorstep, and with his masterful brush he interpreted the many moods of the sea in his prize-winning canvases.

This castle-like stone structure was to remain his home for the rest of his life except for trips throughout the world, especially the South Seas where he frequently visited. Ritschel was an eccentric who dressed in flowered sarong and perched on cypress-covered cliffs in California with brushes and easel. He died at his Carmel home on March 11, 1949.

Member: Salmagundi Club; NY WC Club; American WC Society; Carmel AA; Bohemian Club; Société Internationale des Beaux Arts et des Lettres (Paris); Academy of Western Painters (LA); Allied AA; NAC; NAD

 

Exhibited: SFAA, 1911; NAD, 1913 (prize), 1921 (prize), 1926; NAC, 1914 (gold medal); PPIE, 1915 (gold medal); Calif. State Fair, 1916 (gold medal), 1926 (1st prize); Philadelphia Arts Club, 1918 (gold medal); Calif. WC Society, 1921-23; Salmagundi Club, 1923 (Isador prize), 1930; AIC, 1923 (prize); Royal Academy, 1924; Paris Salon, 1926; Stendahl Gallery (LA), 1929; Santa Cruz Art League, 1937; GGIE, 1939; Biltmore Salon (LA), 1944.

 

In: NAC; NMAA; Monterey Peninsula Museum; PAFA; Oakland Museum; Fort Worth Museum; St Louis Museum; Bowers Museum (Santa Ana); Detroit Art Club; AIC; LACMA; Minneapolis Museum; Crocker Museum (Sacramento); Irvine (CA) Museum; Orange Co. (CA) Museum.

Sources include:  Doris Dawdy, Artists of the American West, Volume III
Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940

Anne Vaccaro, M.F.A.
Lyrical Abstractionist

Anne Vaccaro was born in New York in 1947 and grew up in Philadelphia. She has her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Acadia University and MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art. Vaccaro studied with W. Dean Gillette, David Pease, Daniel Dallman and Romas Viesulas.

She has produced artwork in a variety of media including acrylic and mixed media on canvas and paper, mixed media sculpture, clay, embossing, and beaded and mixed media jewelry.

Artist statement:

"Having Dean Gillette, who studied with Josef Albers, as an instructor, it is no wonder that I consider myself to be a colorist. Romas Viesulas gave me a feel for texture, Daniel Dallman, layering and experimentation and David Pease, attention to detail. I use spraying, throwing, and staining, as well as heavy impasto and attachments. Originally the iconography was inspired by the space walks I watched on TV during the 1960s, but rapidly developed a biological component. Now, both of these elements dissect each picture plane as they meet, merge and float through each other."

She has enjoyed one-person shows in Pennsylvania,Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, New York and Ohio.

Dean Gillette, 1930-2008

Dean Gillette earned a BA from the University of Kansas in 1952.

Studied:

Kansas City Art Institute
University of London
Yale University

Pupil of:

Josef Albers
Conrad Marca-Relli
James Brooks
Burgoine Diller

Exhibitions:

Sheldon Museum of Art
Montgomery Museum of Art
Mint Museum of Art
Hunter Museum of Art

Collections:

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
New Orleans Museum of Art
High Museum of Art
Georgia Museum of Art

SOURCES:
Susan Craig, "Biographical Dictionary of Kansas Artists (active before 1945)"
Who’s Who in American Art. New York: American Federation of Arts, 1936-1976

Widely recognized as one of the most significant painters in the history of California art, and one of the most sought after women painters of the West.

“I have had two careers”, she stated in a 1968 interview for the Monterey Herald, “One as founder of the Monterey Guild and the other as a landscape painter. Both were enormously interesting and both had their beginnings here.”

Born in Sausalito, CA on Jan. 15, 1885. While in her teens Fortune studied art at Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland and St John’s Wood School of Art in London. Returning to California in 1905, she studied at the Mark Hopkins Institute under Arthur Mathews followed by work at the Art Students League of New York City under DuMond, Mora, Sterner, and Chase. Many of her early works were destroyed when the family home in San Francisco was dynamited during the disaster of 1906. Early in her career she concentrated on portraiture; however, it was her landscapes and harbor scenes which brought her international acclaim. She lived and worked in Europe during three periods between 1897-1927. In California her energies were divided between her studio-home in San Francisco at 1254 Hyde Street and the Monterey Peninsula. One of the first artists to introduce the bright palette of Impressionism to California in the early part of this century, her style was considered modern by conservatives.

Fortune was a devout Catholic and in 1929 founded the Monterey Guild which was dedicated to ecclesiastical art. In the mid-1930s she abandoned easel painting for the liturgical arts and, with nine other artists, decorated over thirty Catholic churches across the country. In 1956 she received the Gold Medal Pro Excelsior et Pontifice from Pope Pius XII for her mosaic adornment of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City. Fortune never married, and died in Carmel on May 15, 1969.

Member: Carmel AA; California Art Club; SFAA; Society of Scottish Artists; Monterey Guild.

Exhibited: Del Monte Art Gallery, 1907-28; SFAA, 1913-34; Calif. Art Club, 1914; Panama-Calif. Expo (San Diego), 1915 (silver medal); PPIE, 1915 (silver medal); Helgesen Gallery (SF), 1918, 1921 (solos); NAD 1921-32; Paris Salons, 1923, 1924 (silver medal), 1934; Galerie Beaux Arts (SF), 1927 (solo); Crocker Museum (Sacramento), 1927 (solo); LACMA, 1928 (solo); Santa Barbara Art League, 1928 (solo); Carmel Art Gallery, 1928 (solo); San Diego FA Gallery, 1928 (solo); Calif. State Fairs, 1928-30 (1st prizes); GGIE, 1939; Oakland Museum, 1981; Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art, 1992.

Source: Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940”; E.Charlton Fortune/Carmel Art Association, 2001.

The Italian Afro Basaldella was born in Udine on March 4, 1912, the short form "Afro", with which he also signs his pictures, is his artist name. His brothers Dino and Mirko Basaldella were also painters. Afro Basaldella studies in Venice and Florence, completing his studies in Venice in 1931. He receives a scholarship for a working stay in Rome from the Fondazione Marangoni in 1929, where he meets the artists Scipione, Mario Mafai and Corrado Cagli.
In 1932, the artist lives for some time in Milan, where he also shows works in the Galleria del Milione in 1933. Over the following years, he participates in the Quadriennale in Rome as well as in the Biennale in Venice several times. He is commissioned to paint the Udine opera house in 1936. The artist works on large murals for the World Exhibition along with Corrado Cagli in Paris in 1937. His first one-man show takes place in Tome in the Galleria del Cometa the same year. Afro also executes frescoes for the "Hotel des Roses" on the island of Rhodes. He accepts a lectureship for mosaic painting at the Venice Academy in 1941. He travels to New York for the first time in 1950, where he shows works in the gallery of Catherine Viviano. Afro aligns with Moreni, Corpora, Morlotti, Birolli, Santomaso, Turcato and Vedova, previous members of the "Fronte nuovo delle Arti", together they form the "Gruppo degli Otto" (Group of Eight).
Afro Basaldella teaches at Mills College in Oakland, California in 1957/58. In 1958 he completes a mural for the UNESCO building in Paris. Ten years later he is appointed professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, he has to leave the post in 1971 for health reasons. As of the early 1970s, he is intensively working on his graphic oeuvre.
The style of his early works in the 1930s is close to the Venetian tradition, however, the artists discovers Cubism as of 1937. He intensively examines works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. In addition, his works from the 1940s shows influences of the Roman School and also expressionist and post-cubist elements. After an artistic crisis in 1946/47, a time during which hardly any paintings were made, Afro attains an abstraction that is based on analytic and synthetic Cubism. He gets to his own mature style with a clear emphasis on light and color not before encountering the abstract Expressionist Arshile Gorky in New York. The late oeuvre is characterized by an increasing harmonization on the one hand, and on the other, by a consolidated use of forms and a subtle refinement of the media.
Afro counts among the most important abstract Italian painters. He dies in Zurich on July 24, 1976.

The work of drawing water drops is the act of melting everything into water drops and purely to "nothing". When we return everything such as fear, anger and worry to "unpreparedness", we will be able to experience peace and tranquility. Some people expect the growth of ‘ego’, but I aim at disappearance of ‘ego’ so that I am looking for the way of its expression.

Kim Tschang Yeul was born in Maengsan, South Pyongan province, Chosen on 24 December 1929. He is a Korean painter, who has spent most of his career focused on water drops.

Kim attended the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University from 1948 through 1950. He moved to Paris, France in 1969. In 1996 he was awarded the medal of Knight of Art and Letters, Embassy of France, Seoul. He currently lives in Paris.

His works are shown at the Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, South Korea; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Fondation Veranneman, Ghent, Belgium; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Bochum Museum Art Collection, Bochum, Germany; and elsewhere.

Among his solo exhibitions were ones at the National Museum of China, Beijing (2005); Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (2004); Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris (2004); Draguignan Museum, Drauignan, France (1997); Sonje Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea (1994); Kongkan Gallery, Pusan, Korea (1994); SAGA (Matsumura Graphics, Tokyo), Paris (1993); The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea (1993); Chicago International Art Exposition, Gallery Hyundai, Chicago (1989); Naviglio Gallery, Milan, Italy (1987); Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo (1983); Antwerp Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (1977); Kunsthaus, Hamburg, Germany (1975); and Knoll International, Paris (1973).

Literature
Ronny Cohen, Tschang Yeul Kim.
Lewis Biggs. Working with Nature: Traditional Thought in Contemporary Art from Korea: Chung, Chang-Sup; Yun, Hyong-Keun; Kim, Tschang-Yeul; Park, Seo-Bo; Lee, U-Fan; Lee, Kang-So.