Portraits – Page 10

Anna Katharine Skeele

1896-1963

Theme/Style – Modernism, figurative art, portraits, landscape, genre

Media – Oils, gouache, watercolor, charcoal, lithographs

Artistic Focus – An exhibiting artist for almost 50 years, Katharine Skeele was a highly-regarded portraitist, but was primarily known for her rich, respectful depictions of people and scenes of the American Southwest. Critic Arthur Millier’s appreciation for the “satisfying feeling of weight and texture” in Skeele’s artworks, and their sophisticated simplicity, speaks to her commitment to the Modernist aesthetic she shared with many of the foremost progressive Southern California artists of her day.

Career Highlights –

Anna Katharine Skeele was born on in 1896 in Wellington, Ohio, and grew up in Ohio and in Michigan, where she took art lessons privately and in youth classes at Olivet College. She later moved to Monrovia, California, and studied at Pomona College in Claremont from 1914 to 1917.
In 1922 Skeele attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and then became a pupil of Stanton Macdonald Wright in Los Angeles. She continued her studies through the early 1920s in Monterey, California, with Armin Hansen; at the Art Students League in New York; and with George Bridgman. Skeele went on to study in Europe through the late 1920s, in Paris at l’Académie Julian and l’Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and with André Lhôte; and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, with Felice Carena.
Upon returning to Monrovia, Skeele had a solo show at the Grace Nicholson Galleries in Pasadena in 1927. Around 1928, after traveling to Taos, New Mexico with a friend, Skeele developed a strong interest in and connection to the Southwest U.S., and she would return often to sketch the residents and their environs.
Skeele exhibited frequently from the 1930s through the 1950s, in southern California at the Los Angeles Museum annual Painters’ and Sculptors’ Exhibition, the Foundation of Western Art’s annual “Trends in California Art” exhibitions, the Los Angeles Art Association, the Hollywood Gallery of Modern Art, the Woman’s Club of Hollywood, the Pasadena Art Institute annual, the Pasadena Society of Artists, the Laguna Beach Art Association, La Fiesta de Los Angeles, and the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego (now the San Diego Museum of Art); in northern California at the Oakland Art Gallery and Santa Cruz Art League annuals; and with the California Watercolor Society in a nationwide traveling exhibition in 1946 that included New York’s Riverside Museum.
Skeele was included in an “All-Modern” show at Los Angeles’s California Art Club in 1929, along with other Modernists such as Mabel Alvarez, Boris Deutsch, Helena Dunlap, Peter Krasnow and Edouard Vysekal; and in 1931 Skeele was in another show of Modernist artworks at the city’s Central Library, along with Robert Gilbert, Everett Gee Jackson, Ward Montague and others.
Skeele’s painting Eagle Dance won a prize in the Los Angeles Museum annual in 1931, and in 1933 the painting won the Leisser-Farnham prize at the annual exhibition at the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego. Skeele also won a prize at the Santa Cruz Art League annual in 1934, for her portrait of fellow artist Edith Hamlin, whom she worked with in Taos.
Skeele had a solo show at the Dudensing Gallery, New York, in 1931; and her solo exhibitions in California during the early 1930s included the Little Studio-Gallery, Monrovia; University of Southern California, Los Angeles; and the Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery, Santa Barbara.
In 1934, Skeele was included in the exhibition “Progressive Painters of Southern California” at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Led by Tom E. Lewis, the group also comprised such Modernists as Dorr Bothwell, Phil Dike, Arthur Durston, Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg and Paul Sample.
As part of the Public Works of Art project, Skeele executed a 7-by-33-foot-long mural depicting daily life in Taos for Torrance High School, California, completed in 1936; and also in 1936, other work by Skeele done under the auspices of the Federal Art Project was exhibited in Fresno, CA.
Skeele’s painting Taos Woman was included in the San Francisco Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, where Skeele set up her easel at the Palace of Fine Arts and made over 400 crayon portraits of visitors. Her work was also in the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas.
During World War II, Skeele participated in U.S.O. sketching parties, where artists drew portraits of servicemen to keep and send to their families. The artists’ group in Los Angeles was led by painter Frode Dann and included Skeele, Dan Lutz and Edward Biberman, among others. Frode Dann and Katharine Skeele were married in 1946, and after her marriage she used the name Katharine Skeele Dann (or the initials KSD) on her artwork.
In 1951 Skeele and Dann founded the Pasadena School of Fine Arts, with Dann as its director, and Skeele and Dann as instructors, along with Ejnar Hansen and Milford Zornes. Skeele continued to devote much of her time to painting, and she and Dann exhibited together in local shows including the Chaffey College Gallery, Ontario, and the Whittier Art Galleries.
Skeele’s works are in the collections of California museums including the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach; the San Diego Museum of Art; the Long Beach Museum of Art; and the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles. Besides those mentioned above, she received honors and awards from the Sacramento State Fair; Los Angeles County Fair, Pomona; and the Women Painters of the West, among others.
Skeele continued to travel throughout her life, including trips to Mexico, Guatemala and Europe in the late 1950s. On a trip to Europe with Dann in 1962 she spent most of her time in Morocco sketching the people, whose lifestyle reminded her of the Native Americans of the Southwest.
Anna Katharine Skeele Dann passed away shortly after returning home from her European trip in 1963, in Pasadena, California. A “Katharine Skeele Dann Memorial Exhibition” was held at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1964; and there was a Katharine Skeele and Frode Dann retrospective at the Jack Carr Gallery in Pasadena in 1972.

Philip Paval

1899-1971

Theme/Style – Figurative art, landscapes, portraits, Abstraction

Media – Oils, sculptures in gold, brass, and sterling silver, fine silver jewelry and tableware

Artistic Focus – Philip Paval was not only an artist, but a celebrity. He made acquaintances and even friends with both European and Hollywood royalty. Some of his fine silver work was given as gifts to these friends. And Paval became well known in Los Angeles for his silver and gold sculptures as well as his portraits in oil of Hollywood celebrities. Later in his career, Paval’s paintings were of a less serious nature, including clowns as his subjects, and later moving into abstraction.

Career Highlights –

As a teenager in his native Denmark, Philip Paval studied art and was apprenticed to a silversmith.
After immigrating to America in 1919, he worked as a merchant seaman in New York.
During the 1920s he moved to Los Angeles where he established a silversmith shop.
Paval exhibited a most unusual brass sculpture at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.
Paval exhibited and won many prizes internationally before his death in Los Angeles in 1971.

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Hazel M. Sheckler

1887-1981

Theme/Style – Modernism, still life, botanical

Media – Oils, watercolor, gouache, lithographs, photography, ceramics, murals

Artistic Focus – Hazel Sheckler was quite remarkable in her ability to enthusiastically interweave her many artistic pursuits with a role she found equally fulfilling, as her husband’s partner in running a cattle ranch in San Diego County. Her lithographs of flowers are particularly striking, with a brilliant, kinetic quality that makes them seem to pulsate with life and energy.

Career Highlights –

Born Hazel Marguerite Finch in 1887 in Los Angeles, California, Hazel Sheckler was raised in Los Angeles and later in South Pasadena. As a young girl she studied music and was an accomplished pianist; she also studied art while a student at South Pasadena High School.
The family later moved to San Diego, where Sheckler’s father, a carpenter, built homes and worked on the construction of the historic Hotel del Coronado.
In 1909 Hazel married William Claude Sheckler, the son of early California pioneers who had established a cattle ranch in San Diego County in the 1870s; and after their marriage, the Sheckler family ranch became their home. The ranch, along what is now Highway 94 and located ten miles from the Mexico/United States border, became an early way station for travelers in the days of horse and wagon transportation.
Sheckler embraced her role as a “ranch wife.” She sewed, knitted, and wove saddle blankets and rugs on a loom; raised and sold chickens, eggs, and turkeys; baked bread and canned from her garden; rode with the men rounding up cattle; and according to a relative, “she was considered a better shot than most of the men.”
Even with the considerable demands of daily ranch life and raising her son, Sheckler painted, sketched, made ceramics, and did photography in her makeshift art studio behind her home, where she had a darkroom and a kiln. Friendships with fellow San Diego artists Donal Hord, Anna Marie Valentien, Charles Fries, and others resulted in countless gatherings and many hours of painting at the ranch.
From the mid-1930s through the early 1940s, Sheckler created prints under the auspices of the Federal Art Project. During the same period she produced a series of watercolors for the Federal Art Project, as part of the Index of American Design. Conceived as an effort to identify and preserve a national, ancestral aesthetic, the Index comprises over 18,000 watercolor renderings of American folk and decorative arts objects from the colonial period through 1900. As part of this collection, Sheckler’s watercolors of textiles and equestrian items are housed in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Sheckler also assisted artists Jean Goodwin and Arthur Ames on the three-panel WPA (Works Progress Administration) mural at the San Diego County Administration Center entitled Recreation, Agriculture, and Conservation, completed in 1939; and she exhibited with the San Diego Art Association in Balboa Park and at shows throughout San Diego County.
Hazel Sheckler passed away in San Diego, at the age of 94, in 1981.

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Helen Forbes

1891-1945

Theme/Style – Modernism, landscapes, portraits

Media – Oils, murals, watercolors, temperas, etchings

Artistic Focus – Whether creating landscapes, still lifes or portraits, Helen Forbes took a direct, honest approach to her subjects, creating works that exhibited simplicity, honesty, and a careful, unemotional attention to detail. Her watercolors done in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains demonstrated her enthusiasm for her subject, using clear, quickly applied color on the paper; and some of her most compelling work was done during a stay in Death Valley, where she used the frenetic desert forms and the primitive upheavals of the surrounding mountain ranges to create paintings with startling themes and simple, almost abstract images.

Career Highlights –

Helen Forbes was born in San Francisco and trained at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute (later the California School of Fine Arts), where she received a lifetime scholarship in 1914.
Forbes then traveled through Europe, studying in Germany and France, before returning to California in 1924. There, she studied for a time with Armin Hansen in Carmel.
Her landscapes included oils painted during a visit to Mexico in the mid-1920s, during which her work began to show a new economy of treatment and a recognition of the sculptural qualities found in nature and in Mexican architectural forms.
Living in a deserted inn in Death Valley from 1930 to 1932, Forbes produced paintings which portrayed forbidding, almost hallucinatory visions of the region.
The murals that Forbes began creating on commission for the Works Projects Administration in 1934, were highly regarded – particularly her mural of Noah and the animals of the Ark, created for Mother House at Fleishhacker Zoo in San Francisco.
Forbes, who taught for a time during the 1930s at UC Berkeley, passed away in San Francisco in 1945.

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Edna Reindel

1900-1992

Theme/Style – American Magic Realism, Regionalism, Surrealism, still lifes, portraits

Media – Oils, murals, sculpture

Artistic Focus – Using a sophisticated glazing technique reminiscent of van Eyck and other Renaissance painters, Edna Reindel created still life compositions with a sense of three-dimensionality and a heightened focus. Her precise style and deft handling of the brush, combined with the use of clear, rich color and concise form, produced works known for their impressive clarity and level of detail. A major force in American Magic Realism, Reindel’s paintings often featured an unconventional cropping of space, a trademark of the hyper-realistic style in which she worked, and an unusual visual perspective contributed to a mysterious psychological dynamic in her work.

Career Highlights –

Reindel studied art at the Pratt Institute in Detroit, Michigan.
She held her first one-woman show at New York’s Macbeth Gallery in 1934.
Reindel worked for the Federal Art Project of the WPA, completing a number of murals on commission from 1937 to 1942.
Her work was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and at the Carnegie International (1937-1949).
Her work is currently included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

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Norwood MacGilvary

1874-1949

Theme/Style – Modernism, Surrealism, fantasy, figurative work, landscape, portraits, illustration, murals

Media – Oils, watercolors, pastels, woodcuts, lithography

Artistic Focus – Regarded as an “artist-philosopher” and, as one critic described him, “a painter of philosophy as well as being a philosophical painter,” Norwood MacGilvary painted a multitude of subjects in varying styles, but is often recognized for his daring surrealistic aesthetic, exploring themes such as the impermanence of life, humanity’s will to survive amidst the turmoil of war, and the individual’s inner struggle to find meaning in existence.

Career Highlights –

Norwood MacGilvary was born in Bangkok, Thailand in 1874 to American missionary parents, and traveled extensively with them throughout his childhood. By his early teens MacGilvary was back in the U.S., living in Virginia and attending Davidson College in North Carolina.
MacGilvary later studied art and philosophy at UC Berkeley (1896-1897), and at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco (1897-1898). He then traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julian with Jean-Paul Laurens, and had his first exhibition at the Paris Salon; he then went on to study under Myron Barlow in Etaples, France.
By 1906 MacGilvary was back in the U.S., living in New York and Providence, Rhode Island and working as a magazine illustrator for Cosmopolitan and Harper’s, among others. He exhibited with the Boston Art Club in 1908, the National Academy of Design in New York and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1910, and with the New York Water Color Club in 1911.
He eventually returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, exhibiting with the San Francisco Art Association in 1914 and at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition, where he won a silver medal.
MacGilvary joined the Salmagundi Art Club in 1916, and on behalf of the club’s War Service Committee during World War I, he and others painted landscapes for military use in training gunners. He exhibited with Allied Artists of America, New York in 1919, and was a member of the Architectural League as a muralist.
By 1920 MacGilvary was again living in New York, with a studio in Greenwich Village and a position as instructor in the School of Fine and Applied Arts at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. There was a solo show of his paintings and sketches in the school’s Art Gallery in 1920, and that same year he was included in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s paintings exhibition in Washington, DC, and again in their eleventh biennial in 1928.
By 1921 MacGilvary had again relocated, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a freelance illustrator and became a professor of painting and decoration at the Carnegie Institute’s Department of Fine Arts, serving as faculty chairman in 1928, and head of the painting department in 1929, remaining there for the next 22 years. His wife, Adeline MacGilvary, a writer, became active in the city’s Authors Club; and the couple and their two children spent summers in the art colony at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where MacGilvary was a member of the Rehoboth Art League and was one of the artists signing the “Doors of Fame” in 1939, after the League’s dedication of their building at Henlopen Acres in Sussex County, Delaware.
MacGilvary exhibited with the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Institute from the 1920s through the 1940s, including a one-man show in 1926; as well as in other group shows at the Carnegie Institute. He had a one-man show at the Woman’s City Club of Pittsburgh in 1923; and a one-man exhibition of MacGilvary’s paintings traveled through North Carolina, at Raleigh, Winston-Salem and Asheville in conjunction with the Federal Art Project in 1936. He exhibited at the Gillespie Galleries, Pittsburgh in 1934, and in a group show at the Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, Ohio in 1938.
Following his retirement from the Carnegie Institute in 1943, MacGilvary joined local Pittsburgh artists in opening a gallery at 134 Stanwix Street, and he was elected president of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh in 1944. MacGilvary and his wife continued to summer at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where during the late 1940s he exhibited and taught summer classes at the Rehoboth Art League.
Besides the organizations mentioned above, MacGilvary was also a member of the American Watercolor Society, the Boston Art Club, and the Allied Artists Association of Paris. His works are held in many public and private collections including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Norwood MacGilvary passed away in 1949, and shortly thereafter he was honored by a memorial show at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. MacGilvary was also included in the exhibition “Southwestern Pennsylvania painters, 1800-1945” at the Westmoreland County Museum of Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania in 1981.

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