Still Lifes

Edward Hill

1843-1923

Theme/Style – Landscape, genre scenes, still life, portraits

Media – Oils, watercolors

Artistic Focus – Though less well known than his brother Thomas Hill, Edward Hill was a productive painter in oil and watercolor for more than 60 years, producing images of the natural beauty of California as well as its people, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, southern genre scenes, and other subjects. While his early landscape work had a Tonalist quality, his later paintings became somewhat brighter and more impressionistic. Though Hill routinely painted attractive traditional landscapes, he was somewhat unique among the painters of his day in that he would also frequently include people going about their activities in many of his scenes, giving his paintings a lively, intimate quality.

Career Highlights –

Edward Hill was born in Wolverhampton, England in 1843, the ninth of 10 children, and a year later the family moved to the U.S., settling in Taunton, Massachusetts.
After working with his brother Thomas Hill (1829-1908) as a furniture painter at the Heywood-Wakefield Company in Gardner, Massachusetts, Hill began traveling often to the western U.S. during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In San Francisco, Hill shared a studio with brother Thomas in 1862-1863 and again in 1872. He painted many California landscapes and exhibited with the San Francisco Art Association in 1873 and the Oakland Industrial Exposition in 1896. The brothers also traveled together to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Still maintaining strong ties with New England, beginning in the 1870s Hill was artist-in-residence at the Profile House in Franconia Notch, New Hampshire for 15 summers. He exhibited with the Boston Art Club during the 1880s, gaining financial success and a solid artistic reputation with his paintings of the White Mountains and maintaining a studio in Bethlehem, New Hampshire in the early 1890s.
A constant traveler throughout his career, Hill studied in Europe in 1891, and would go on to spend time throughout the U.S., living and working in Denver, Colorado; Utah (exhibiting at the Utah State Fair in 1909); Seattle, Washington; and Portland, Oregon; as well as the American South.
By 1911 Hill had settled in the Pacific Northwest, residing in Hood River, Oregon and exhibiting at the Portland Library in 1914.
Hill briefly maintained a studio in Los Angeles during 1920 and 1921 before he passed away in Hood River in 1923.
Retrospective exhibitions of Edward Hill’s paintings include “Edward Hill: A Man of His Time” at Plymouth State College in New Hampshire (1985) and “Nature’s Nobleman: Edward Hill and His Art” at the New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord (1989-1990). His work is in the collections of the New Hampshire Historical Society and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.

Selection of Works by this Artist

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Paul Julian

1914-1995

Theme/Style – Modernism, figurative work, portraits, animals, still life, landscapes, genre scenes, animation art

Media – Oils, tempera, watercolors, ceramic sculpture, murals, lithography, illustration

Artistic Focus – Paul Julian had a long career, as a skilled painter of many subjects, a WPA muralist, and also a background animator and title designer for several Hollywood studios. His painting style varied over time, from bold Modernist contours and deep colors, to more abstract and fanciful subjects using a bright and lively color palette.

Career Highlights –

Paul Julian was born in Illinois in 1914, the son of artist Esther Julian (1893-1979), who was his first painting teacher. By the 1930s Julian was living in Santa Barbara, California. He studied art at the Chouinard Art Institute and privately with Millard Sheets and others.
Julian exhibited throughout California in the 1930s and 1940s, winning first prize at the California State Fair and second prize in an exhibition at the Oakland Art Gallery in 1936. Also in 1936, he exhibited in Los Angeles at Stendahl Galleries and in a solo show at Bothwell and Cooke; and with the Santa Cruz Art League in 1936 and 1938.
Julian was included in exhibitions of artwork from the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP), one at the Paris Exposition in 1937, and another in San Francisco at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum entitled “Frontiers of American Art” (1939).
Also in 1939, Julian exhibited in San Francisco at the Golden Gate International Exposition, followed in 1940 by shows in Los Angeles including a solo exhibition at the Chouinard Gallery, and group shows at Barker Brothers and Raymond and Raymond Galleries.
During the early 1940s Julian created Federal Art Project murals for Southern California institutions, including his oil on canvas mural “The Orange Pickers” for the Fullerton Post Office. He also created murals for the U.S. Armory in Santa Barbara, the Santa Barbara County Clinic, Belvedere Gardens School in Los Angeles, and Upland Elementary School, where his petrachrome mosaic mural included 24 different colors of marble.
Julian exhibited with the Los Angeles Art Association throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and his whimsical painting “I Hate Birds” was included in the Association’s show in 1946.
By the mid-1940s, Julian was working as a background artist for animated films at Warner Bros. and other Hollywood studios; and he continued to exhibit, with the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild (1943), Zeitlin and VerBrugge (1944), Vanbark Studios (1947), with the Screen Artists at the John Decker Studios (1948, 1949), and in a show of lithographs at Lynton R. Kistler’s gallery (1948).
Through the 1950s Julian had one-man shows at the Mid-Twentieth Gallery (1949), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1950), and the Landau Gallery (1951, 1954, 1957). Group shows included the Pasadena Art Institute (1950), Chaffey Community Art Association (1951), “Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1953, 1955), and the California Water Color Society at Long Beach Municipal Art Center (1953).
During his career in animation, Julian also contributed voice and sound effects, including the iconic “beep-beep” sound of the Road Runner character; and beyond background art he filled many other roles including production designer, title designer and art director. In 1953 he served as both designer and color artist for “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Subject. He served on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1975 and 1976, and was the first designer-painter to receive an “Annie” award from the International Animation Society in 1980. He is credited on over 100 animated films, the last being “FernGully: The Last Rainforest” (1992).
A tempera copy of Julian’s Fullerton Post Office mural was included in the exhibition “Dream and Perspective: The American Scene in Southern California, 1930 to 1945” at the Laguna Art Museum in 1991. Paul Julian passed away in Van Nuys, California in 1995.

Selection of Works by this Artist

I Hate Birds

Simon Vanderlaan

1904 – 1986

Theme/Style – Figurative art, landscapes, still lifes

Media – Oils, drawings, graphic work

Artistic Focus – Simon Vanderlaan was primarily a commercial artist and illustrator, whose sought-after artwork – including “pinup” images of seductive women – appeared in advertisements, calendars and album covers. However, his artistic range extended well beyond these subjects to striking, award-winning graphic work in posters, as well as original paintings and drawings, many of which he never chose to exhibit during his lifetime.

Career Highlights –

Simon (“Si”) Vanderlaan was born in Muskegon, Michigan in 1904. In the 1920s he moved to Chicago, where he studied at The Art Institute of Chicago, and created theater posters for theaters in both Chicago and Grand Rapids, Michigan.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1933, pursuing further study there at the Art Center School (now the ArtCenter College of Design) and the Chouinard Art Institute.
Vanderlaan designed a poster for San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, and took prizes in poster contests for the Institute of Foreign Travel in 1936, the Advertising Club of Los Angeles in 1939, and for New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1941.
He then began working as a commercial artist, including work for Walt Disney Productions from 1940 to 1945.
From the late 1940s, Vanderlaan worked as a self-employed advertising illustrator and also taught art at Woodbury College in Burbank for nearly 20 years.
Vanderlaan exhibited and won awards for his paintings and graphic art in shows for the Traditional Artists’ Association at the National Orange Show Fine Arts Gallery in San Bernardino in 1972, and the San Gabriel Fine Arts Association in 1973.
Simon Vanderlaan passed away in Los Angeles in 1986. A very private man, Vanderlaan had kept most of his original artwork in storage, and more has become available since his passing.

Selection of Works by this Artist

San Francisco World's Fair, 1939

Clinton Adams

1918-2002

Theme/Style – Modernism, Abstraction, still life, landscape, townscape

Media – Oils, tempera, gouache, watercolor, mixed media, lithography

Artistic Focus – As a painter and printmaker, Clinton Adams produced a mix of traditional representation and Modernist abstraction. Proficient in many media, he is known for his clean, abstracted architectural forms, the richly-toned watercolors he produced in the 1940s and 1950s, and also as one of the most important influences on the development of fine art printmaking in the United States. An acknowledged authority on the subject of lithography, Adams created handsome original prints, wrote seminal books, and was a key figure in the renowned Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles and Tamarind Institute in New Mexico.

Career Highlights –

Clinton Adams was born in Glendale, California in 1918, and studied at UCLA, earning a Bachelor of Education degree in 1940 and a Master’s degree in 1942.
Adams began teaching at UCLA as a graduate student around 1941, and in 1942 he was included in exhibitions at the American Contemporary Gallery in Los Angeles and the “Artists of Los Angeles and Vicinity” show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
After serving in World War II, he became a full professor of art at UCLA around 1946 and began to study lithography. By 1948 Adams, along with other artists such as Jean Charlot, Henrietta Shore, June Wayne and Lorser Feitelson, was working with noted lithographer Lynton Kistler to produce prints for exhibition.
Adams exhibited with the California Water Color Society at the Pasadena Art Institute in 1948. He was represented by Los Angeles’s Felix Landau Gallery in the 1950s and 1960s, and was included in the 1950 First International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio with Ray Bertrand, Rico Lebrun, Fernand Léger, Pablo O’Higgins and others, as well as in shows at City Hall, Los Angeles in 1951 and UCLA’s Fine Arts Gallery in 1956 with Annita Delano, Stanton Macdonald Wright, and others.
Adams remained at UCLA until 1954, when he left Los Angeles to chair the art departments at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and the University of Florida in Gainesville.
When fellow printmaker June Wayne founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1960, Adams returned to serve as its Associate Director.
He continued his association with Tamarind after relocating to New Mexico in 1961; and when the Workshop’s funding in Los Angeles ran out, Adams encouraged its move to the University of New Mexico in 1970, where he was Dean of the College of Fine Arts. Once in New Mexico, the name of the workshop was changed to the Tamarind Institute, with Adams as its director and also editor of the journal The Tamarind Papers.
Adams remained actively involved in the University of New Mexico as a professor and administrator while working with Tamarind and pursuing his interest in early American lithography. He authored a number of books including the definitive history American Lithographers 1900-1960: The Artists and Their Printers (1983) and coauthored, with Garo Antreasian, The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art & Techniques (1971), which is considered the standard text on the subject.
Adams served as director of the Tamarind Institute until 1985, when he retired from both teaching at the university and his role at the Institute.
Adams had more than 30 solo shows during his career, including at the aforementioned Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, California State University Northridge, and Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe, NM. His tempera painting Barrington Street (1951) was included in the important exhibition “Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2000-2001.
Adams passed away in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2002. The exhibition “Clinton Adams: Memorial Retrospective, 1918-2002” took place later that year at the Tobey C. Moss Gallery in Los Angeles. The catalogue raisonné A Meticulous Serenity: The Prints of Clinton Adams, 1958-1997 was published in 2012.
Adams’s work is in the collections of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts; the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena; the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Selection of Works by this Artist

Still Life with Gourds

Mine Okubo

1912-2001

Theme/Style – Modernism, Social Realism, Abstraction

Media – Oils, watercolors, drawings

Artistic Focus – A Southern California native, Mine Okubo received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the mid-1930s from the University of California, Berkeley, then left for Europe on a traveling art scholarship. When war broke out, she escaped on the last ship to leave Bordeaux, France. After painting several murals on commission for the Federal Art Project between 1939 and 1942, Okubo was sent to a Japanese internment camp in Utah. She spent the rest of the war there, teaching art classes, editing a literary magazine, and creating “painfully hard-edged representations of community life in the Utah internment camp.”

Career Highlights –

Okubo wrote and illustrated Citizen 13660, a book about her camp experiences, and eventually transformed her anger into positive expressions in what she called her “Happy Paintings” period in the 1960s.
Through the years, her art moved from its initial “hopeful and naïve” period into her wartime use of tighter lines and a stark black-and-white palette, then back into works described as “instinctive expressions of sheer joy…exalted affirmations of man’s ‘animal soul’ and primitive nature over today’s mechanized and routinized existence.”
The politics of World War II transformed her, both personally and artistically. As one writer said of her, “Confronted with the crisis of identity thrust upon her by the Evacuation, she was suddenly forced to face the truth and the consequences of being a nisei in America. Her emerging consciousness as a Japanese-American contributed in the end to make her a richer, far more creative and resourceful artist.”

Yajiro Okamoto

1891-1963

Theme/Style – Modernism, figurative art, landscapes, still lifes

Media – Oils

Artistic Focus – One of Okamoto’s favorite subjects was floral still lifes, but he was equally proficient as a landscape and figurative painter. His works possess a naïve power through their highly unique use of color, detail, and composition.

Career Highlights –

Born in 1891 in Hiroshima, Japan, Yajiro Okamoto received some art instruction from Matsusaburo Hibi, but was basically self-taught.
Okamoto joined the U.S. Army in Hawaii at the beginning of World War I.
After the War Okamoto moved to San Francisco, and had a barbershop for many years.
During this time Okamoto was a member of the San Francisco Art Association, and exhibited in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s Inaugural Exhibition in 1935, at the Museum’s Art Annuals that followed, and at the Art Association in 1936 and 1937.
During World War II, Okamoto was sent to an internment camp at Topaz, Utah.
He passed away in San Francisco in 1963.