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Watered silk painting done in Honolulu around 1945.
He started painting as a kid, using colored pencils, probably because that was the only “medium” the family could afford. Nothing remains of that early age, but we have drwings that he created as a teenager, forward up to the time of hi sdeath.
To me, my dad is first, an artist and second, a welder. I have to agree with his statement late in his life that he wasn’t really a paleontologist, he was a bone collector.
Art Deco series
He was fascinated by the art deco items and projects and prepared a set of 12 drawing in the style in colored pencil. They are available here as a slide show:.
Seward 1941
There was little work in Seward when he arrived in 1940. While hunting for work, he ended up at the Alaska Shop as a jack of all trades. When Luella Parsons discovered, probably through Rachel Beisner, that dad was an artist, she had him prepare a series of post cards of huskies which she sold in the gift shop.
SLC 1942
After he was married, Marie gave him his first set of pastels which became his medium of choice after he went through some experimental periods.
!944 Pearl Harbor
While in the civil service in Honolulu, he engaged in an astonishing range of media and artistic activities. One of them was drawing dresses with patterns that he would like to reproduce in linoleum blocks. This gallery contains most of the ones I could find. He had a terrible time with faces, a problem that haunted him up to the time he died. The difficulty became less but family could tell that he was struggling with this or that face.
1948 Self-Study Art Course
This course was purchased from Walt Disney and included several large volumes. He did the lessons assiduously and benefitted.therefrom. The only memory I have of him doing this course was his anger when interrupted. Man alive, don’t do ANYTHING that distracts him! The other thing is the green eye shade shows in this newsclipping from the SLC TRIBUNE in 1949 when I was 7 years old. As I recall it was around this same time that he actually got into silk screening but without him or evidence to establish the truth, we’ll jus let the date sit.
1951 - 1956 Seward
In Seward his interest in painting expanded and produced substantial income. This photo shows him doing one of his daily 10 minute sketches that mom forced him to do. He resisted saying that he was going just fine, but she knew that he wasn’t. (It was around this time that she took first place in the local art show, surpassing him, which stunned him. She knew what she was talking about and he knew that she knew that he knew that she knew so he knuckled down. What happened wad that she’d announce that his sketch time had some, “Grab a kid!.” any kid, which he did and one of us would hvae to sie on the couch behind him for 10 minutes while he ripped off a sketch. His drafting improved significantly as best I recall.
His favored media were pastels, and charcoal & chalk. He also worked in oil, Pastels, Charcoal & Chalk, Acrylic, charcoal & chalk, watercolor. He Stretched & prepped own Canvases, created his own frames and mattes, and mounted & framed his paintings. Alaskans loved his portraits and bought all that he painted. Landscapes and snowscapes also received enthusiastic responses.
In 1972,
Humble Oil in its May bi-monthly journal included an article about Alaska’s Artists
1971 He did little painting during the Harvard years and early BYU years. After I sent him a Sierra Club book “Almost Ancestors”, he caught fire and began a painting campaign that lasted for 25 years. I estimate that during his life he painted and sold 3-400 Indian and Eskimo paintings. This is a price list for an art show he did in 1978: There were a total of 35 pictures in this set. He made a sales trip later in the 70’s through New Orleans and to Florida, taking about 80 paintings, most of which sold. He was a prolific painter when on fire. Notice how many pictures hang behind him in this photo. He sold them as fast as he painted them. That’ s what kept him painting.
I managed to collect about 45 images of some of his Indian-Eskimo paintings to put into a gallery. The color and the focus is poor in most of them but you can get an idea of what he was doing in each one:
Click here to see a page of thumbnails that you can then double-click.
Another gallery of paintings of various types:
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