Coreen Mary Spellman: Printmaker, Painter, and Professor of Art

Coreen Mary Spellman

Coreen Mary Spellman, printmaker, painter, and teacher, was born on March 17, 1905, in Forney, Texas, the second of six children of Michael and Carrie (Huffines) Spellman. Her father was a well-to-do Irish farmer and banker. Interested in art from an early age, her parents, neither of whom were artistically inclined, nurtured Coreen's talent. By the time she entered adolescence, her father was driving her to Dallas, which was twenty miles east of Forney, for weekly art lessons. Spellman majored in costume design at the Texas State College for Women in Denton (later Texas Woman's University), where she earned her bachelor of science degree in 1925. She received a master's degree in art from the Teachers' College at Columbia University in 1926. Spellman took art history and museum classes at Harvard University on a Carnegie Summer Scholarship in 1927 and from 1928 to 1929 attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied with notables Charles Locke, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Vyclav Vytlacil. After her year at the Art Students League, Spellman accepted a post in the art department at Texas State College for Women in Denton, where she taught until her retirement in 1974. She continued her art studies in summer classes with Carlos Merida (1932), Charles J. Martin (1933), and Eliot O'Hara (1936) and at the University of Colorado. She attended the University of Iowa from 1941 to 1942, where she earned a master of fine arts degree.

Coreen Mary Spellman
Adobe for Sale
ca. n.d.
Watercolor
15 x 21 inches

Spellman was a versatile artist, skilled in watercolor, etching, aquatint, mezzotint and was especially adept in lithography. She studied watercolor techniques with Chales Martin in Provincetown cand credits him with a masterful understanding of composition, apparent in her work. Her realistic style was suited to represent urban scenes, southwestern landscapes, and portraits. Her work demonstrates her interest in realism, precisionism and abstraction. 

Coreen Mary Spellman
Railroad Signal
ca. 1936
Oil on beaverboard
20 x 16 inches
Collection of Bill and Mary Cheek

Coreen Mary Spellman
Road Signs
ca. 1936
Oil on canvas
 28 1/4 × 36 1/4 inches
Dallas Museum of Art

Many of Spellman's compositions are characterized by a spare, grid-like geometry-an observation of man-made silent industrialism which included both interior scenes and landscapes.

Coreen Mary Spellman
Sun on the Kitchen Floor
ca. 1947
Lithograph
8 3/8 x 4 7/8 inches
Dallas Museum of Art

Coreen Mary Spellman
Krum Weighing Station, Krumca. 
ca. 1947
Lithograph
14 3/8 x 10 1/8 inches
Dallas Museum of Art

Coreen Spellman exhibited her work extensively throughout the Southwest and in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and New York. She won many prizes in competitive exhibitions. In 1932 the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art) mounted her first solo exhibition, which was the first of more than thirteen solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Witte Museum in San Antonio (1933), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1933), the Santa Fe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1949), New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico (1949), and the Elisabet Ney Museum in Austin (1950). 

Coreen Mary Spellman
Nudeca. 
ca. 1929
Lithograph
 6 x 9 inches
Dallas Museum of Art

In 1932 one of Spellman's lithographs, Nude, was selected by the Society of Graphic Arts as one of the fifty best prints of the year, and in 1936 the American Artists Congress selected one of her mezzotints for inclusion in an exhibition of contemporary American prints that was held simultaneously in thirty cities in the United States. Her work was also represented in American Prize Prints of the 20th Century (1949).

Coreen Mary Spellman
Boats on the Lakeca. 
ca. 1959
Watercolor
 14 x 21 inches

Spellman was one of eight founding members of the Printmakers Guild (later the Texas Printmakers), a group of printmakers, originally all women, who proposed to inform the public about printmaking and give female printmakers an opportunity to show and sell their work through annual circulating print exhibitions. Spellman was active in the group, serving as president in 1946, until it disbanded in 1965. She was also a member of the Southern States Art League, Denton Art League, Delta Phi Delta,Delta Kappa Gamma Society, Associated Art Instructors of Texas, and National Women's Teacher Association. In addition to her teaching, exhibition, and club activities, Spellman lectured, illustrated books and pamphlets, and traveled extensively. For many summers she taught in New Mexico although she remained a resident of Denton. Spellman retired from Texas Woman's University in 1974. She died on October 15, 1978, and was honored posthumously by a portfolio of twelve lithographs assembled by the National Alumnae Association of Texas Woman's University. Several of her prints were exhibited in the 1990 exhibition The Texas Printmakers, 1940–1965. Her work is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Joslyn Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; the Dallas Museum of Art; the San Antonio Museum Association; Southern Methodist University, Dallas; Texas Woman's University, Denton; and numerous private collections.

Coreen Mary Spellman

The Red Barn 

ca. 1930s

Watercolor

Sources
______________________________________________________

Coreen Mary Spellman, Texas State Historical Association, Kendall Curlee, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsp29, retrieved June 7, 2015.

Peter Hastings Falk, ed., Who Was Who in American Art (Madison, Connecticut: Sound View, 1985). 

Graphic Works of the American Thirties (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977).

 Paul Rogers Harris, The Texas Printmakers, 1940–1965(Dallas: Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, 1990). Vertical Files, Special Collections, Texas Woman's University.

Phil Kovnick and Marian Yoshicki Kovnick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, University of Texas Press, 1998, p. 287-288.

Dallas Museum of Art, Coreen Mary Spellman, https://www.dma.org/collection/artwork/coreen-mary-spellman, retrieved June 7, 2015.

Tina Modotti: Photographer who led a Controversial Life

Edward Weston
Tina Modotti
ca 1925
Gelatin Silver Print

Nicknamed Assuntina, and later Tina, Tina Modotti was born in Udine, Friuli, Italy, the daughter of an Italian machinist who immigrated to the United States in 1906. Despite her rudimentary formal education, Modotti focused on intellectual matters. She grew up among the working poor and politically motivated. Modotti toiled in a textile factory before joining her father in 1913 in San Francisco, where she worked as a seamstress and dressmaker. Attracted to the lively performing arts scene in the Italian emigre community in the San Francisco Bay Area, Modotti tried acting. Her striking appearance and artistic modes of expression led to brief careers in the theater,  opera, and even silent films during the late 1910s and early 1920s. She worked as an artist's model as well.

Modotti married American painter and poet Roubaix "Robo" del L'Abrie Richey in 1918 and the couple moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the burgeoning motion picture industry. Modotti met photographer Edward Weston and his assistant Margrethe Mather and, by 1921, she was his favorite model and his lover by the end of that year. Robo left Los Angeles for Mexico where he died of smallpox while on vacation two days before she arrived.

Edward Weston
Tina Modotti
ca 1925
Photograph
Gelatin Silver Print

When Weston moved to Mexico City two years later in 1923, Modotti became first his assistant, apprentice and eventually his partner in a joint photographic enterprise. The close-up vantage points and lack of context in her early work attest to the influence of Weston and his emphasis on “the thing itself,” but, as Modotti gained experience, her images took on a personal character. The couple embraced the capitol's bohemian scene and used their connections to begin a portrait business.

When Weston returned to California  in 1926, Modotti stayed behind. In 1927 she joined the Communist Party, and her political affiliations and activities changed the direction of her work. She published her images, including portrait studies, in the magazines Mexican Folkways, Formas, and the more radical El Machete. 

Tina Modotti
A proud little agrarista or better son of one 
ca 1927
Gelatin Silver Print

Modotti became the photographer for the Mexican mural movement and documented the works of such artists as Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. In addition, she experimented with architectural interiors, flowers, and urban landscapes, especially with her poetic portraits of peasants and workers. 

Modotti's one-woman show at the National Library held in December 1929 was advertised as "The First Revolutionary Photographic Exhibition in Mexico." The apex of her career as a photographer would quickly plummet within a year.

Tina Modotti
Market Scene
ca 1927
Gelatin Silver Print

Political and economic issues in Mexico, Central and South America intensified with repression of political dissidents. Modotti's comrade and companion Julio Antonio Mella was assassinated by what were assumed to be agents of the Cuban government in January 1929 and shortly thereafter, an attempt was made on the president. Modotti-target of both the Mexican and Italian police-was questioned about both crimes during a a concerted anti-Communist, anti-immigrant press campaign that depicted her as the "fierce and bloody Tina Modotti," perpetrator of the crimes. 

As a result of the anti-Communist campaign by the Mexican government, Modotti was expelled from the country in 1930 and placed under guard on a ship bound for Rotterdam. The Italian government repeatedly attempted extradition but she managed to evade it by her connections with International Red Aid Activists. Modotti's limited visa allowed for her final destination to be Italy. She stopped in Germany and Switzerland on her way there and was convinced by the deteriorating situation in Germany to move to Moscow in 1931. 

Tina Modotti
Woman of Tehuantepec
ca 1929
Gelatin Silver Print

The Italian government repeatedly attempted extradition but she managed to evade it by her connections with International Red Aid Activists. During the next several years, Modotti worked for various missions on behalf of the International Workers' organizations and the Comintern in Europe. When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, she left Moscow for Spain where she stayed until 1939. Following the collapse of the Republican movement in Spain, Modotti returned to Mexico under a pseudonym and avoided contact with her former comrades. She died of heart failure in Mexico City under what some believe are suspicious circumstances. Her brief career in photography lasted only seven years, but Modotti produced a body of work that included evocative images.  

Tina Modotti
Hands of the Puppeteer
ca 1929
Gelatin Silver Print

Tina Modotti
Misery
ca 1928
Gelatin Silver Print

Tina Modotti
Pinatas
ca 1926
Gelatin Silver Print

_______________________________________________________________
Sources
1. The Web Museum, Tina Modotti, Biography, http://www.modotti.com/?page_id=5, retrieved May 26, 2015.
2. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Women Photojournalists, Tina Modotti, http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/womphotoj/modottiessay.html, retrieved May 26, 2015.
3. Encyclopedia Britannica, Tina Modotti, Italian Photographer, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1160291/Tina-Modotti, retrieved May 26, 2015.
4. George Eastman House, Still Photograph Archive, http://www.geh.org/ar/strip87/htmlsrc3/modotti_sld00001.html, retrieved May 26, 2015.

Isabelle Clark Percy: Artist and co-founder of the California College of Arts and Crafts

Isabelle Clark Percy West
(Center)
At her namesake Isabel West Gallery
  Campus of the California College of Arts and Crafts
ca. 1958-59 

Isabelle Clark Percy was a painter, lithographer, etcher and a liberated woman of her times. Born in Alameda, California on November 6, 1882, she was the daughter of prominent architect George W. Percy, designer of the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, the Hobart Building in San Francisco, and the Christian Brothers Winery in Sonoma. Isabelle studied art at the Mark Hopkins Institute from 1901 to 1905 under Arthur Mathews, with Brangwyn in London, and with Dow and Snell in New York. 

Along with Perham Nahl and Frederick Meyer, Percy founded the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in about 1907, and for many years she taught there as a Professor of Design. Over the course of her career, Isabelle designed book plates and worked in oil, pastel, watercolor, and color lithography and in 1915, won a bronze medal for her lithography at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Isabelle continued to teach at the college until her retirement in 1941 at which time a gallery, which is still in use on the campus, was named in her honor.

In 1916, Isabelle married George Parsons West, a San Francisco historian and journalist, and settled into a home that she built across the bay in Sausalito where she maintained a studio and continued to paint. The couple divorced in 1934. Following residency in Brooklyn and New York City, until 1920, she returned to the California School of Arts and Crafts from 1921-1942. Isabelle was a member of the San Francisco Art Association and the California Society of Etchers. Her work was exhibited in Paris, Germany, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago in addition to the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco. 

Percy produced a large body of work of both California Themes and of subjects viewed during trips to Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado. She created landscapes, seascapes, and trees in Marin and Monterey counties, studies of adobes, Bay Area scenes and landmarks, views of the missions, and Mother Lode Country themes. She worked until her death in nearby Greenbrae on August 15, 1976. 

Isabel Clark Percy 
Maartjie and Neltjie in the Yard
ca. 1913
Oil on canvas board
16 x 12 3/4 inches

Isabelle Clark Percy
European Street Scene
ca. 1913?
Pastel

Isabel Clark Percy
Cervantes Inn, Toledo, Spain
ca. 1914
13 5/8 x 10 7/8 inches
Color lithograph

Isabelle Clark Percy
Carmel California
ca. 1913?
Pencil and pastel on paper
12 x 9 inches

Isabelle Clark Percy
House Beautiful Cover
ca. 1928
Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper
20 3/8 x 15 3/ 4 inches

Member: San Francisco Sketch Club; San Francisco Art Ass'n; California Society of Etchers. Exhibited: Guild of Arts & Crafts, 1904; Starr King Fraternity, 1905; Del Monte Art Gallery (Monterey), 1908, 1909; Paris Salon, 1911 (honorable mention); Sorosis Club, 1913; California Society of Etchers, 1913; Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915 (bronze medal); California Artists, Golden Gate Park Museum, 1915; San Francisco Art Ass'n, 1916-25; Oakland Art Gallery, 1932; California College of Arts and Crafts, 1973 (solo). Works held: California Historical Society; Oakland Museum; California College of Arts and Crafts.

_______________________________________________________
Sources
Sylvia Moore, ed., Yesterday and Tomorrow, California Women Artists, Midmarch Arts Press, New York, 1989, p. 69.
Edan Milton Hughes, Specializing in the Art of Early California, http://www.edanhughes.com/biography.cfm?ArtistID=720, retrieved May 19, 2015.
The Annex Galleries, 19th, 20th, and 21st Century Fine Prints, Isabel Percy West Biography, http://www.annexgalleries.com/artists/biography/1854/West/Isabel, retrieved May 19, 2015.
Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West, University of Texas Press, 1998.
Isabelle Percy West, askART, http://www.askart.com/artist_bio/Isabelle_Percy_West/6009/Isabelle_Percy_West.aspx#, retrieved May 19, 2015.

Blanche McVeigh: Printmaker, Gallery Owner, Educator

Blanche McVeigh
Trees
ca. N.D.
Etching with drypoint
Spencer Museum of the University of Kansas

Blanche McVeigh, was born in 1895 in St. Charles, Missouri. She moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where she grew up. Upon completion of high school, Blanche taught at the local W.A. Huffman School No. 1 for several years with little apparent enthusiasm. Interested in art, she switched gears and attended the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, Washington University during the years 1919 and 1920. After graduating from Washington University, McVeigh decided to become a professional artist. She joined the Wimberly Advertising Agency in Fort Worth in 1923 as an artist and remained in their employment until about 1930. During this time she studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts for one summer and at the Art Institute of Chicago for another. McVeigh subsequently attended the Art Students League in New York City and spent a year in Europe, where she first became interested in the medium of aquatint, a form of etching.

Blanche McVeigh
Tree on a Hill
ca. 1934
Etching with drypoint
7 x 9 inches

In 1932 Blanche joined fellow artists Evaline Sellors and Wade Jolley to establish the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts, where she taught figure drawing and etching and in addition, was responsible for bringing examples of the works of such masters as Matisse, Picasso, and Braque to the city. McVeigh also was manager of the Art Department of the Collins Art Company in Fort Worth. McVeigh and Sellors were founding members of the Fort Worth Artists Guild, the first local institution to display local artists. In 1942 McVeigh completed a commissioned etching for Northern Pump Company, a Minneapolis defense factory; her press at the time was not large enough for the print, so the company owner gave her a large, fine Sturges press, one of only seven made.

Blanche McVeigh
Accepted
ca. 1940Aquatint
12 x 8 5/8 inches

Blanche McVeigh
Commissary
ca. 1940
Aquatint10 5/8 x 14 7/8 inches

McVeigh produced an impressive number of images as she evolved from etchings to aquatints including a series on African American Spirituals. She also did western subjects, among them Fort Worth area landscapes, old buildings, as well as New Mexico themes.

Blanche McVeigh
Adobe Houses
ca. 1941Aquatint
9 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches

Blanche McVeigh
Cabrini Day Care Center
ca. N.D.
Aquatint on paper7 x 9 inches

Blanche McVeigh received awards from the Dallas Print Club, the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Texas Fine Arts Association, and the Southern States Art League. Her aquatint Gwine to Heaven (1945), a small work representing her impression of the Negro spiritual, was awarded the Lila May Chapman Prize of the Southern States Art League and was reproduced in American Prize Prints of the Twentieth Century. McVeigh was a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists, the Dallas Print Club, the Fort Worth Art Association, Prairie Printmakers, the California Society of Etchers, the Printmakers Guild of Texas, and the Southern States Art League. Her work is included in many national collections, among them the Library of Congress, the Carnegie Institute, Princeton University, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution. In Texas her works can be found in the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery in Austin, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, the Amon Carter Museumqqv in Fort Worth, and the Fort Worth Art Association, as well as in many private collections. She died in Fort Worth on June 1, 1970.

Blanche McVeigh
Tall Door, St. Charles, Missouri
ca. N.D.Aquatint
9 3/8 x 12 3/8 inches

_______________________________________________

Sources

Texas State Historical Society, Blanche McVeigh, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fmcbf, retrieved April 25, 2015.

An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick, Blanche McVeigh, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998, p. 215-216. 

Linda Peterson, "MCVEIGH, BLANCHE," Handbook of Texas Online(http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fmcbf), accessed April 24, 2015. Uploaded on June 15, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

artnet, Blanche McVeigh, http://www.artnet.com/artists/blanche-mcveigh/adobe-houses-HENn5WkkZKQJMRU_t8GgNg2, retrieved April 25, 2015.

Julia Ann Rudolph: Capturing the Light

California is one of the few regions in the United States where the earliest women photographers has been the subject of scholarly research. Searching historical records for women photographers, painters, and sculptors requires considerable patience and exploration. Even today, female artists and photographers variously use their maiden names, change their last names to make recognition and pronunciation easier, or get married and take their husband's names. These changes make the search to correctly attribute work to the woman, especially for those working before the turn of the last century, infinitely more challenging. Our featured artist, Julia Rudolph also worked under the names Julia Ann Raymond, Mrs. James Ferdinand Rudolph and Julia Ann Swift.

Photography is one of the most historically significant inventions of all time. Although the principle of the camera was known in antiquity, the chemistry needed to register an image did not occur until the nineteenth century. Renaissance artists used a camera obscura (Latin for dark chamber), or a small hole in a darkened box that would pass light through the hole and project an image upside down of whatever was outside the box. It was not, however, until the invention of a light-sensitive surface created by Joseph Nicephore Niepce that the basic principle of photography was born.

Camera Obscura

The early pioneers in the medium experimented with its use as strict documentary photography during the Civil War, then setting up still-lifes and art-style portraits. Although it is thought that photography was almost exclusively a male-dominated profession, women have been involved with he medium since its invention in 1839.  By the mid 1840s, women were well established as commercial photographers in cities such as Boston, Chicago, New York, and St. Louis.

Julia Ann Rudolph
Nevada City, 1856
ca. 1856
Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Julia Ann Rudolph was one of California's earliest photographers. The exact dates of her birth and death is unknown however, it is believed she lived from approximately 1820-1900. Rudolph was active in Utica, New York from 1852-1855; Nevada City, California from 1856-1860; and Sacramento, California from 1863-1890. Peter Palmquist, photography historian, claimed that "Rudolph's 36-year tenure as a California photographer is remarkable," and constitutes "an exceedingly rare longevity for a woman in that profession during the 19th century."

Rudolph was a studio portraitist who produced daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes mounted in leather and paper as was customary in the first decades of photographic portraiture. She was published in Hutchings' California Magazine (1857) with an engraving based on her ambrotype of Edward E. Matteson, developer of the hydraulic mining system.

Julia Ann Rudolph
Photograph of an unknown woman subject
ca. n.d.
Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Julia Rudolph trained for the teaching profession and received her certificate in Litchfield, Connecticut in 1839, the same year that the first photographic process, the daguerreotype, was announced in France. By 1852, she was working as an operator in Daniel David Tompkins Davie's daguerreotype gallery in Utica, New York, and by April 1856, she had relocated to California in the former galleries of noted daguerreian George O. Kilbourn in Nevada City. The advertisement that noted her debut there stated, "she has all the latest instruments and chemicals and with the light of the gallery, which is unsurpassed by any in the state, she is confident of making the most perfect likenesses as well as beauty of tone and finish."

Julia Ann Rudolph
Mrs. Campbell
ca. n.d.
Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

By 1855, Julia was married and using the last name, "Raymond." She dealt in daguerreotypes but was prepared to work with photographs on paper as soon as the chemicals that she had ordered became available. The gallery burned in the fire of July 1856 and by September, Julia opened a new gallery on the same street adding ambrotypes to her repertoire. Sometime within the following three months, she reverted to using her maiden name, "Swift," indicates that she had undergone a divorce. In December of 1856, Julia married a pharmacist, James Ferdinand Rudolph, and she operated her business using his last name.

Julia Ann Rudolph
Photograph of a Young Girl in a White Dress
ca. n.d.
Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

 Julia Ann Rudolph
Photographs of Carrie Rudolph and Kate Y. Rudolph as Young Girls and Toddlers
ca. n.d.
Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

In September of 1860, Rudolph announced the closing of her ambrotype gallery in Nevada City and, by 1863, she and her husband had moved to Sacramento which remained in business until 1890. Rudolph's photographs are in the collection of the California State Library, Sacramento, the Women in Photography International Archive, Arcata, California, and the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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Sources:
For information on the early photographic process and various techniques see Early Photography, Niepce, Talbot, and Muybridge, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/early-photography/a/early-photography-nipce-talbot-and-muybridge, retrieved April 13, 2015.
Women Artists of the American West, Susan R. Ressler ed., McFarland & Co, Inc., 2003.

Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840-1865, Peter E. Palmquist, Thomas R. Kailbourn, Stanford University Press, 2000.

Helen Loggie: Orcas Island by Pencil and Etching Needle

Helen Loggie
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
1895-1976

Helen Loggie was a nationally recognized artist who lovingly portrayed her native Washington State. She recorded the dense vegetation, gnarled trees, meadows, and surrounding areas from her home on Orcas Island with passion as she spoke of the "earth which was somehow part of every drop of my blood and every thought in my brain." 

The daughter of a prominent lumberman, Loggie was raised in the lumber and fishing town of New Whatcom. She wrote that she "never saw a gallery or an art school until I was a sophomore in college." She attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts during the years 1915 to 1917 and at the Art Students League in New York from 1917 to 1919 where she studied under Robert Henri with the intention to study portraiture. During her years of study at the League, she created urban realist scenes of everyday life in New York that were a popular genre at that time. She continued to study privately with John Taylor Arms, with whom she later collaborated over a twenty-five year period, and spent time working in France and Italy from 1926 to 1927, where she created an extensive body of sketches and paintings. 

Helen Loggie
Carriage Entering a City Park
ca. 1918
Etching
Lambiel Museum, Seattle Washington

Helen Loggie
Wooden Madonna
ca. 1926
Graphite
9 13/16 x 7 3/8
Lambiel Museum, Seattle Washington

Loggie returned to Washington and settled in Bellingham where she maintained a second home on Orcas Island, and where she spent much of her time. She claimed, "I’m a Northwest artist, and the cathedrals of the Northwest are the trees."

Helen Loggie
Unk and Es
ca. 1918
Etching
Lambiel Museum, Seattle Washington

Helen Loggie
Shuksan in Winter
ca. 1935
Etching
The Lambiel Museum, Seattle, Washington

Although Loggie worked on other subjects, such as a long series on the circus, she devoted much of her time to trees in landscape settings, mostly the rugged coastline of Washington. In 1969, an article in American Artist magazine featured a portfolio of her nature series done in carbon pencil, which combines the smoothness of graphite and rich blacks of charcoal. Her last etching, Hosanna, was created in 1960. 

Her exhibition history includes one-woman shows at the Seattle Art Museum in 1939; the Smithsonian Instituion, the National Museum, Washington, D.C. in 1944; the Norfolk Museum, Norfolk, Virginia in 1965; Whatcom Museum of History and Art, Bellingham, 1979; and Western Washington University, Bellingham, 1993. 

Helen Loggie
The King Goblin
ca. 1936
Carbon Pencil Drawing
The Lambiel Museum, Seattle Washington

Her participation in various group exhibitions included the Paris Exhibition, 1937; Venice Biennial, 1940; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1940; Whitney and Metropolitan Museums, New York, 1942; Library of Congress, 1942, 43 and 52; National Academy of Design, New York, 1949-1969; and the Royal Society of Painters, Etchers, and Engravers, London, 1954.

Helen Loggie
Baby Islands
ca. 1940
Etching
9.5 x 6.65 inches
The Lambiel Museum, Seattle Washington

Loggie received awards from the Library of Congress, Pennell Competition of 1943, the Chicago Society of Etchers in 1956, and the National Academy of Design in the years 1955, 1960, 1964, and 1969.

One of her most prestigious awards was the election to the National Academy of Design as an Associate in 1949, and as a full Academician in 1971. The following year, Loggie was recognized by her home state and receive the Washington State Arts Commission Governor's Award for lifetime achievement in art.

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Sources

American Women Modernists, The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910-1945, Marian Wardle, ed., Brigham Young University Museum of Art in Association with Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, 2005, p. 24.

An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, Phil Kovnick and Marian Yoshiki-Kovnick, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998, pp 191-192.

Seattle Met, Helen Loggie, the Orcas Artist, http://www.seattlemet.com/travel-and-outdoors/everything-guide-to-the-san-juan-islands/articles/helen-loggie-the-orcas-artist-august-2014. Retrieved March 21, 2015.

Helen Amanda Loggie, http://www.askart.com/askart/l/helen_amanda_loggie/helen_amanda_loggie.aspx, Retrieved March 21, 2015.

The Lambiel Museum, Loggie Gallery, http://lambielmuseum.org/loggie/loggie-07.html, retrieved March 21, 2015.

Blanche Morgan Losey: Northwest Watercolor Artist, Illustrator, and Interior Designer

Blanche Morgan Losey (1912-1981) loved to depict the details of life; her Seattle city scenes evoke a contemplative mood. Losey studied at the University of Washington and was a member of the Women Painters of Washington for forty years. She was also a member of the Northwest Watercolor Society and the National Association of Women Artists, New York. Losey lived multiple artistic lives: in addition to her watercolors and Works Progress Adminstration (WPA) work, she was the director of Frederick & Nelson's interior design department for more than twenty years, helping to shape the taste of postwar Seattle. She was comfortable in a variety of settings, from the bohemian to the exclusive Rainier Club.

Blanche Morgan Losey
Untitled (Seattle Street Scene)
ca. 1938
Watercolor on paper
David Martin and the artist's estate

Blanche Morgan Losey
One-Third of a Nation
ca. 1938
Ink and watercolor on paper
David Martin and the artist's estate

Losey's work of the 1930s and early 1940s was primarily in watercolor, executed in a crisp, hard-edged Precisionist style. Precisionism (or Cubist Realism) is a style of representation in which an object is rendered in a realistic manner, but with an emphasis on its geometric form. An important part of American Modernism, it was inspired by the development of Cubism in Europe, and by the rapid growth of industrialization of North America in the wake of innovators such as Henry Ford. In its emphasis on stylized angular forms it is also visually somewhat similar to Art Deco. Dealing as it did with pure form more than with any type of narrative or subject matter, Precisionism gradually evolved towards Abstraction, and faded away as an important influence.

Blanche Morgan Losey
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
ca. 1940
Gouache on paper
20 x 16 inches

Women artists participated in the war effort. Many produced works as part of the WPA where artists were paid to create posters for the federal government. Male and female artists organized the Washington State Artists Council for Defense, offering their services in several capacities. The Women Painters of Washington, an organization formed in 1930, held an extremely successful war bond auction at Frederick & Nelson’s department store in 1945 raising substantial funds. 

Losey produced several war-related works including a powerfully suggestive watercolor titled Bombardier’s View. The composition incorporates a menacing observation of a vulnerable Northwest landscape positioned in range as a possible target for oblivion. In addition, she contributed the work below (and won) for the War Poster Competition held at the Seattle Art Museum from July 8 to August 9, 1942. Losey's design incorporates the use of Surrealist imagery and prefigures the later illustrations of the psychedelic 1960s music and anti-war posters.

Blanche Morgan Losey
 Speed Production ca. 1944
 Design for Seattle Art Museum War Poster competition

The Federal Theater Project (FTP) was established by the WPA to provide employment for theater professionals during the Great Depression. The FTP opened in Seattle in 1935 with the sponsorship of the Seattle Repretory Company and the support of the Univeristy of Washington Drama School. The Negro Repertpry Company (NRC) began as a subsidiary of the FTP in January 1936 with 73 African American actors and singers. Originally intended as a temporary effort, strong reception led to the continuation of the company. Losey designed stage sets and costumes for a number of productions of the local Federal Theater Project including the “Negro Unit.” Her collection of stage and costume designs are in the University of Washington’s Special Collections.

Blanche Morgan Losey
Costume Design for "Mother Goose"
The Seattle Negro Repertory Theater
ca. 1938

In the mid-1940s Losey turned to Surrealism and produced a body of work influenced by European artists such as Salvador Dali and Giorgio DeChirico.

Blanche Morgan Losey
Untitled (Hats)
ca. 1945
Tempera on paper
David Martin and the artist's estate

In addition to her activity as a painter, Losey was one of the leading Interior Designers in Seattle, her work included projects for the Seattle Opera House and Century 21, Seattle’s Worlds Fair. She exhibited with the National Association of Women Artists in New York City, the Oakland Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum and other regional venues. Losey’s paintings are in the collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, the Museum of History & Industry and University of Washington, Special Collections.

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Sources
Women Painters of Washington, Blanche Morgan Losey, http://www.womenpainters.com/75th/LOSEY/Losey.html, retrieved March 11, 2015.
Seattle Weekly News: Remembrance of things past, Kristian F. Kofo, http://www.seattleweekly.com/1998-08-19/arts/remembrance-of-things-past/, retrieved March 11, 2015.
HistoryLink.org, The Free Online Encyclopedia of the History of Washington State,  Artists of Washington State during World War II, http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=8435, retrieved March 11, 2015.
University Libraries, University of Washington Digital Collection, http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/ref/collection/social/id/1161, retrieved March 11, 2015.