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PAST EXHIBITS |
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Eleanor Kent Forms and Figures Paintings from the 1950s and 1960s I made most of the works in this show in late nineteen fifties when I was exploring art making at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). A few are from the sixties. I had grown up in San Francisco but spent summers in Kentfield and Steep Ravine and Lake Tahoe. I went back East to study at Radcliffe College (now Harvard) and earned a Bachelor's degree in English in 1953. I returned home and got my teaching credential at UC Berkeley and then got a job teaching in San Francisco public schools. It was interesting to work with exuberant 3rd and 4th graders by day and go to art school at night. I traveled to Europe and around the US during the long summer vacations. After three years of teaching elementary school I decided in 1957 to take a leave of absence to concentrate on painting and drawing. For a summer I had a studio behind the Ferry Building in San Francisco and then took an apartment on the Hyde Street cable car line, near the art school. It was an exhilarating time to be living in North Beach in the late fifties, especially for me after being a schoolteacher during the conservative Eisenhower years. The coffee shops and bookstores were full of ideas and people and music. It was the era of both figurative and abstract painters. My classes with DuCasse, Bischoff, Oliviera, Lobdell, McGaw, and Marie-Rose were full of students also enthusiastic about painting. We learned from each other as well as our teachers: Joan and Bill Brown, Jose Ramon Lerma, Manuel Neri, Renate and Bill McLean, Dean Fleming, Sung Woo Chun, Bob McFarland and Akio Kobayashi. Flo Allen modeled for us, the founder of the model's guild and wonderful friend to all the artists and instructors. Many of us worked together independently in the school studios as well as our classrooms. It was good to trade ideas and techniques and to lay the foundation for later work in painting and other media. After the fifties I painted on my own, but also took various courses for the companionship of working with other artists. I also explored various other media: textile painting, mailart, color xerox, computer art, knitted fractals, wire crochet. But I have always kept painting and drawing. Eleanor Kent |
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©2008 Smith Andersen North - Respective Artists. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction without written permission. |
