Portraits – Page 2

Abraham A. Meripol (A. A. Meripol)

1885 – 1939

Theme/Style – Portraits, miniatures, landscapes

Media – Oils, watercolors, graphite, pen and ink, charcoal

Artistic Focus – A skilled painter and draftsman, Meripol had a particular affinity for the painting of miniature portraits on ivory, and sought to increase the public’s appreciation of this art form. His works on paper include exquisite, tightly rendered botanicals.

Career Highlights –

Born Abraham Meripolski in Kiev, Russia in 1885, Meripol immigrated as a child with his family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There Meripol worked as a newsboy for the Milwaukee Journal.
After recovering from a burn injury, Meripol turned his full attention to drawing, making time each evening to practice and saving money from newspaper sales to pay for lessons from Robert Heule, a local artist.
In the early 1900s, with the money he saved from selling his work to friends, Meripol moved to Chicago and while selling newspapers during the day attended night classes at Smith’s Art Academy. He was a member of the Chicago Art Students’ League, where he exhibited and won two prizes.
In 1907 Meripol moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, to begin his career as a portrait painter. He soon became engaged to a young woman from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
By 1910 Meripolski had shortened his name to Meripol and was living with his wife and daughter in San Francisco. After a trip through Europe, Meripol moved to Los Angeles in 1919, where he hoped not only to paint on canvas but to more fully pursue his miniature painting on ivory.
During the 1920s he was a member of Los Angeles’ Professional Artists Club, where he exhibited in 1924, and the International Artists Club. By this time, Meripol had a thriving career painting both full-size portraits and miniatures for members of the movie industry and other prominent citizens of Los Angeles.
Meripol exhibited with Painters & Sculptors of Los Angeles in 1935, and that same year he was commissioned by the State Emergency Relief Administration (later taken over by the WPA) to create a mural for the Hermosa Beach City Council chamber.
Abraham Meripol passed away in 1939 while on a portrait commission in Salt Lake City.

Tom Craig

1909 – 1969

Theme/Style – California Style landscapes, Regionalism, portraits, figurative art, genre scenes, marines, still lifes, illustration

Media – Oils, tempera, watercolors, murals, graphic arts

Artistic Focus – A major figure in California Style watercolor painting, Tom Craig was an award- winning painter who was facile with subjects ranging from landscapes to portraiture. While best known for his rural scenes often depicting fog or ominous clouds and rain, Craig was able to communicate subtle richness in his portraits and other subjects.

Career Highlights –

Thomas Theodore Craig was born in Upland, California, in 1909.
Craig studied botany at Pomona College, but maintained an interest in art and later attended Chouinard Art School in Los Angeles where he studied with, among others, Millard Sheets and Barse Miller.
In 1928 Craig’s studies at Pomona were interrupted when he contracted tuberculosis and relocated to the desert climate of Palm Springs to recover. It was during this time that Craig started to paint seriously. Upon his recovery he continued his art studies.
Watercolor became Craig’s favorite medium, and depicting the weather patterns of the rural landscapes he liked to paint was of particular interest and led him to paint in Northern California for a time.
During the 1930s, Craig taught in the Los Angeles area at the University of Southern California, Chouinard Art School, and Occidental College.
Craig had a solo exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 1937, and during the 1930s also exhibited at the Los Angeles Art Association, the Laguna Beach Art Association where he won 1st prize in 1936, the Oakland Art Gallery, the San Francisco Art Association, the Los Angeles County Fair, the Santa Cruz Art League, the California Water Color Society, and at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.
During World War II Craig worked as an artist-correspondent in Italy for Life magazine.
A Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1941 allowed Craig to travel and paint throughout the Southwest where he depicted the impoverished in sympathetic character studies.
Craig retired from painting in 1950, settled with his family in Escondido, California, and devoted his remaining years to cultivating and selling hybrid irises to support his family.
Tom Craig passed away in his native Upland in 1969.

Jane Berlandina

1898-1970

Theme/Style – Post-Impressionism, Modernism. Portraits, still lifes

Media – Oils, murals, watercolors

Artistic Focus – Among the canvases painted by Jane Berlandina during her career were portraits, landscapes, genre and still lifes, created in a variety of media, including oil, watercolors and tempera. She was best known for her watercolors, which reflected the teachings of Dufy and featured jarring colors, which she juxtaposed for brilliant effect. Her use of color was said to presage the “push-pull” theories of color use that Hans Hofmann later applied to his work.

Career Highlights –

Berlandina was born in France, where she studied costume design and was a painting student of Raoul Dufy.
She immigrated to the United States to teach art and upon her marriage to architect Henry Howard, she moved to San Francisco.
She also worked as a set designer for the San Francisco Opera Company.
One of the artists commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project to create murals for Coit Tower’s inside walls: Her mural favored a reductive palette of reds, browns and chartreuse outlined in white, a highly fluid, modernist line, and the use of egg tempera rather than the fresco and oil techniques common in other works. Her mural, Home Life, differed in tone from the works produced by her fellow artists. The subject matter, too, was lighter, showing people living their lives in three rooms in a home of the period.

Fletcher Martin

1903-1979

Theme/Style – Regionalism, Western subjects, figurative art

Media – Oils, murals, watercolors, illustrations

Artistic Focus – A Colorado native, Fletcher Martin bridged the Old West and 20th Century America with paintings, watercolors, murals and illustrations that depicted real people in real life situations. Self-taught, his work evolved into a simplified, unsentimental and yet respectful style that reflected every phase of his life. Martin’s work is known for its sense of balance, equilibrium and simplification of detail. His later canvases demonstrated an attraction to a broader color palette, reflecting his satisfaction with a new marriage, his children, and an ever-growing public acceptance.

Career Highlights –

In Los Angeles in the 1930s, a meeting with Mexican painter David Alvaro Siquieros sparked an artistic transition from a romantic painter to one who focused on ideas as the substance of every canvas. Although Martin disagreed with Siquieros’ insistence that an artist’s canvas offer social commentary, he nonetheless began to create works with “a tolerant understanding and obvious affection” for their subjects.
Martin taught at the Art Center and other colleges in the Los Angeles area. He also taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, and in 1940, was appointed to replace Grant Wood as the artist in residence at the University of Iowa.
On assignments for government and corporate clients, he documented the world of tobacco farmers, the health conditions of Eskimos and native Americans, and the events of World War II.
One of Martin’s war paintings was featured on the cover of the December 27, 1943, edition of Life Magazine.

Claibourne Randolph Tatum

1913-1988

Theme/Style – Figurative art

Media – Oils, murals

Artistic Focus – Little is known about the body of Clay Randy Tatum’s work. He seemed to prefer the figure, painting scenes of sportsmen and workers earlier in life, and portraits later in life.

Career Highlights –

Born in San Francisco in 1913, Claibourne Randolph Tatum studied at the California School of Fine Arts in the 1930s.
In 1936, Tatum was a member of Frank Van Sloun’s painting crew for large murals in the rotunda of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, and he assisted Diego Rivera on his murals at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939.
Tatum’s religious beliefs led to his imprisonment for draft evasion at McNeil Island prison in 1945. Six years later, a serious auto accident left him depressed and with stiff hands which made future painting difficult.
During the 1950s Tatum lived in Marin County, where he made a living doing portrait commissions. He spent his last years in Los Angeles, passing away in 1988.

Sueo Serisawa

1910-2004

Theme/Style – Impressionism, Modernism, Regionalism, Expressionism, Abstraction,
still lifes, portraits

Media – Oils, watercolors, lithographs

Artistic Focus – Serisawa’s early works were romantic – still lifes and portraits painted in a style influenced by classic European art. His work up to 1941 had a decidedly Modernist, even Regionalist flair. But history – both personal and political – intervened, as Serisawa later returned to his Asian roots and began painting in an abstract style influenced by the teachings of Zen philosophy, Oriental culture, and the structure and form offered in his study of calligraphy.

Career Highlights –

Born in Japan, Sueo Serisawa moved to Seattle in 1918 to join his father, painter Yoichi Serisawa, and began painting at age 8 with his father’s guidance.
Serisawa later studied art under George Barker, as well as at the Otis Art Institute and the Art Institute of Chicago.
On the day that his one-man show opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, America was plunged into war; the date was December 7, 1941.
The subsequent internment of Japanese-Americans sent the Serisawa family to New York City, to avoid confinement. As difficult as that time was, Serisawa later said that his time in New York was a significant influence on his development as an artist.
Later in his career, Serisawa taught art at Scripps College, the Laguna Beach School of Art and the Palm Springs Museum of Art.
Serisawa’s works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.