About the Annual California Statewide Exhibition by Ed Penniman

Revisiting the Romance of the California Landscape

77th Annual Statewide Landscape Exhibit

Cover painting: “Santa Barbara Peaceful Evening,” 20 x 16 inches, Oil, by Juror Mark Farina, Pacific Grove, California (Collection of Ed Penniman.)

Revisiting the Romance of the California Landscape.

It is my great honor and pleasure to welcome you to the 77th Annual Statewide Exhibition hosted by the Santa Cruz Art League. As the curator of this year’s show, it has been my manifest intention to bring back some of the traditions associated with the Statewide in its formative years, when it was one of the most important exhibitions of contemporary art in California.

The principal focus of the Statewide Exhibition at its founding in 1928 was on landscape paintings. In those days, having one’s landscape included into the Santa Cruz Statewide Exhibition was something to be extraordinarily proud of, and it was also a significant item to be added to one’s resume as an artist. Winning first prize garnered substantial press throughout the state, established the artist as “noteworthy,” and yielded many invitations to other shows. It also led to commissions for paintings. It was a very big deal.

For more than three decades, the Statewide Exhibition was the biggest annual event at the Santa Cruz Art League. There was a sense of reverence and tradition around the exhibit during this era, one that extended into the entire Santa Cruz community. Included in this catalogue is an historical essay by Geoffrey Dunn that reveals some of the human history of plein air art in Santa Cruz. More than a decade ago, working with then Art League president, Pauline McKim, Geoffrey salvaged the ragged remainders of the Art League’s records from a trash pile, organized them, and had them placed in the archives of the Museum of Art and History. His essay recalls many of the important personages who helped lay the groundwork for the Art League and its annual statewide exhibition. That legacy presents a challenging benchmark not only for the Statewide, but for the Art League itself.

One of the names recovered by Geoffrey in his essay is that of my grandmother, Leonora Naylor Penniman, a member of the fabled “Santa Cruz Three,” as they were known in art circles throughout the West. I have wonderful memories of Leonora and her two close associates, Margaret Rogers and Cor de Gavere. And so I feel a strong personal legacy with the Statewide as well.

One of the things I remember most from my childhood about the Statewide is the high level of excitement and anticipation it generated. Margaret Rogers, who for many years served as the Art League’s president and then, as president emeritus, oversaw the statewide, would authoritatively move about the gallery dictating tasks for members who were involved in a mutual quest for perfection. Great attention was paid not only to the art selected, but also to the presentation of the works chosen. The trio was keenly focused on having the yearly show present only the best California landscapes composed in the state each year.

Serving as curator of this statewide has brought back vivid memories of the legendary Santa Cruz Three. Margaret Rogers could be stern, but she was always straightforward. You knew where she

Welcome to the Santa Cruz Art League’s 77th Annual Statewide Exhibition.

Ed Penniman

It is my belief that there still is considerable interest in stunning and inspirational landscapes of California by California artists. It is my hope that this exhibition will reinforce the idea that landscape painting still lives as a vital and elegant expressive art form, particularly at a time of global environmental degradation. Perhaps the appreciation of natural beauty as expressed by these painters will serve as a call-to-action and also heighten awareness that we all play an important part in the stewardship of nature.

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Leonora N. Penniman (1884-1957)

“Felton Lime Quarry” Plein Air, Oil, 22 x 15 inches 1931 (Penniman Family Collection.)

stood. Cor de Gavere was very quiet and had a mystic quality about her. I never really knew her that well. I hope that one day she is recognized nationally as the truly extraordinary painter she was. I owe a lot to my grandmother Leonora; she mentored me, was patient with me, and lovingly opened the massive doors of the art world to me. I have sacred youthful memories of us together painting and I want to honor her with this exhibition.

Santa Cruz, California, May, 2007

Romance of the Landscape:

It has become something of an historical aphorism that the birth of the plein air art movement in California — with its implicit nod to both the Barbizon school and Impressionism — can be traced directly to the legendary Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, which opened in San Francisco in February of that year. With more than 4,500 paintings on display by artists from around the world (including significant landscapes by Monet, Pissarro, Millet, Renoir and Corot), the nearly year-long PPIE exhibition certainly brought a heightened awareness of contemporary European (and, also, Far Eastern) artistic styles to California’s general public. But the transition of California’s dominant pastoral aesthetic from a majestic view of nature, with somber tones and grandiose panoramas reflecting the dominant colonial sensibilities of 19th century Britain and Germany, to a more intimate and immediate naturalism, with softened forms and more colorful, imaginative palettes, actually began much earlier, in the late 1880s and early 1890s. If anything, the PPIE reflected the culmination of a regional artistic movement, centered in both San Francisco and Monterey, that had taken several decades to develop and mature.

During the robust era of California’s Gold Rush and stretching into the 1870s, visiting artists to the region brought with them their native cultural sensibilities that, for the most part, had been fostered in northern Europe or the eastern United States. In a sense, the early California landscapes of artists like Thomas Hill, Charles Nahl, Albert Bierstadt, Ernest Narjot, and William Hahn, reflect the imposition of a cultural aesthetic on the region, rather than an aesthetic derived and rooted in place. It is an important distinction. There were also economic underpinnings to the aesthetic, as there so often are to cultural expression, as the market for California paintings leaned toward those renditions that were both traditional and familiar.

But as landscape painters began spending more and more time in California, and indeed, as a new generation of artists who were born and raised in the Golden State came of age, the varying intensities of sunlight and color in California, particularly in the coastal regions, began to impose themselves on the styles and sensibilities of its artists, calling for a brighter palette and more delicate interpretations of light. And if the works of major European painters were not coming directly to California during this formative era (although George Inness, considered the greatest American landscape painter of his generation, and a practitioner of the Barbizon school, made an impactful visit to the region in 1891), the rising generation of California painters during the 1880s and 1890s almost invariably sojourned to

Santa Cruz and the California Plein Air Movement Geoffrey Dunn

In the open air you are inspired to use colors that would have been unimaginable in the more diffused lighting of the studio.

— Pierre-Auguste Renoir

How do you see this tree? Is it really green? Use green then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don’t be afraid to paint it as blue as possible.

— Paul Gauguin

Santa Cruz has everything—ocean, hills, lagoons, open fields, blue skies, blue water, its wonderful redwood and eucalyptus groves…an ideal spot in which to live and paint.

— Cor de Gavere

William Keith, the dean of California landscape painters, spent part of the spring and summer of 1882 painting in the Santa Cruz Mountains. (Geoffrey Dunn collection.)

Europe for schooling and intense cultural encounters with European masters. They studied at the Royal Academy in Munich and later at both the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Julian in Paris. Europe thus had its influence, but it was no longer dominant, and as the light and unique landscapes of California asserted themselves, a native cultural aesthetic was born. The dean of California landscape painters during this transitional era was, without question, William Keith. Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1838, Keith immigrated with his family to New York in 1850. Apprenticing as a wood engraver as a teen, he worked throughout Europe and the United States before settling in San Francisco in 1859, where he eventually opened his own engraving business. By his mid-twenties, however, he had taken up painting, went abroad for study in Düsseldorf, Germany, and soon made painting his career. Befriending fellow Scotsman John Muir in the early 1870s, Keith began making journeys to the Sierras, where he painted magnificent landscapes that reflected both his training in Germany and the popular styles of the day. He became wildly successful and earned the nickname “California’s Old Master.”

Following the death of his wife in 1882, Keith actually spent part of a summer painting and teaching in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Two important works from Keith’s oeuvre — Misty Mornings in the Santa Cruz Mountains and Moonlight in the Santa Cruz Mountains — were completed during this period. He also courted his future wife, Mary McHenry, during this rejuvenating moment in his life, which also foreshadowed a profound shift in style. After visiting Europe from 1883 to 1885, Keith’s renderings had taken on a tonalist sensibility, far more intimate and lyric in their mood. “When I began to paint,” he acknowledged in a talk in 1888, “I could not get mountains high enough nor sunsets gorgeous enough for my brush and colors. After a considerable number of years experience, I am contented with very slight material—a clump of trees, a hillside and sky; I find these hard enough, and varied enough to express any feeling I may have about them.” The shift in California landscape painting had commenced.

While Keith was centered in San Francisco, a secondary cultural epicenter developed in Monterey, with the arrival of the colorful Jules Tavernier in 1875. A native of Paris and schooled at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Tavernier worked his way across North America as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly. He was once described by a San Francisco journalist as “free born, unconventional as the wind, ignorer of public opinion, generous, interesting, erratic, improvident, high strung — all of these things he was in superlative.” He was also a most talented artist and embraced the artistic innovations of the Barbizon school, located in the Fontainebleau Forest, just outside his native Paris. As Scott A. Shields has noted in his brilliant work, Artists at Continent’s End: The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, 1875-1907, Tavernier broke with the early California aesthetic of Hill and Bierstadt, and created “more intimate views of nature rendered with a freer and more spontaneous handling of paint.”

Although Tavernier’s sojourn to Monterey would last not quite four years he

angered local residents with derogatory compositions of street scenes published in the San Francisco Call — the artistic impulse in Monterey, and nearby Carmel, had taken hold. In the ensuing years, Keith and Inness would make extended painting journeys to the peninsula, while the likes of Julian Rix, Raymond Dabb Yelland, Meyer Strauss, and Gideon Jaques Denny would come to the peninsula for extended stays or to establish studios of their own. During the first decades of the twentieth century, leading up until the conclusion of World War I, a bevy of first-rate California landscape painters, including Charles Rollo Peters, Arthur and Lucia Mathews, Will Sparks, Xavier Martinez, Charles “Carlos” Hittell, Gottardo Piazonni, Anne Bremer, Evelyn McCormick, Mary Curtis Richardson, Francis and Gene McComas, Eugen Neuhaus, Albert DeRome, Mary DeNeale Morgan, and, perhaps most notably, Armin Hansen, would either call the peninsula home or take extended painting excursions there.

It would be an overstatement of grand proportions to say that Santa Cruz, with its economic foci on limestone, tanneries, commercial fishing, lumber production, and an incipient tourist industry, was in any way central to the bourgeoning California art scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it was not. Although close in proximity to both San Francisco and Monterey, it was nevertheless geographically isolated and culturally conservative, and Santa Cruz marched to the beat of an entirely different drum. Nonetheless, the cultural gravities of both San Francisco and Monterey had their impacts here, and Santa Cruz developed a satellite art scene of its own.

There were two leading figures in Santa Cruz during this era: Frank L. Heath, raised in Santa Cruz and the son of prominent local businessman and politician, Lucien Heath; and Lorenzo Palmer Latimer, a native of the Sierra Nevada, and the son of a federal judge. (Their social status reflected the upper-class backgrounds of many — but not all — California artists during this era, who could afford formal training and study abroad.) Heath studied at the San Francisco School of Design under Raymond Dabb Yelland, who had a life-long influence on his student’s work, and he lived and worked in San Francisco for more than a decade, before returning to Santa Cruz and eventually opening a palatial studio on Beach Hill. In 1885, with the financial support of Frederick A. Hihn, he founded the Society of Decorative Art of Santa Cruz, which operated an art gallery on Pacific Avenue until 1891. Latimer, the same age as Heath (they were both born in 1857), also studied at the School of Design (his mentor was Virgil Williams), and, while he maintained a residence and studio in San Francisco, both he and Heath began teaching art classes in Santa Cruz in the 1890s. These groups of students became known as “The Jolly Daubers.”

One of Heath’s most promising students, Lillian Josephine Dake, recalled that Heath “would rent a horse and carryall, and the livery stable would send it around early in the morning to pick up each member of the art class. Then we’d go to Felton or Scotts Val-

Frank Lucien Heath, leader of the Jolly Daubers and founder of the Santa Cruz Art League (Geoffrey Dunn collection.)

Lillian Howard

(1865-1930)

“Poppies” 1893

11 x 14 inches, Gouache on board

(Geoffrey Dunn collection.)

ley or up the coast toward Davenport to spend a day painting.”

Dake and another young Jolly Dauber, Lillian A. Howard, would come to play significant roles in the nascent Santa Cruz art scene. Dake, a native of Milwaukee, arrived here with her widowed mother in 1877. She first began her formal study of art in New York City, but returned to Santa Cruz, taught art here, and eventually married her mentor Heath in 1897. She was a delicate and accomplished watercolorist, her early works showing a strong trace of Barbizon tonalism, and she continued an active career in painting until well into her 90s. Like many other painting couples of the era, Dake-cum-Heath opted solely for watercolors, while her husband focused on oils. She would later claim that she abandoned oils because her husband’s were “so superior,” though such a gender-determined faultline was typical of that generation.

Howard, a native of Richmond, Indiana, began her professional career teaching botany at Santa Cruz High. She was an avid naturalist painter and had 400 of her stunning botanical watercolors entered into the World’s Colombian Exposition of 1893, in Chicago. An article in the January 11, 1893, Santa Cruz Daily Surf, entitled “A Floral Four Hundred,” noted that “Howard’s magnificent collection of Pacific Coast flowers painted in watercolors and neatly mounted has been selected for the coming ‘dress rehearsal’ in San Francisco and at the World’s Fair in Chicago. This is a matter for congratulation, not only to Miss Howard but to Santa Cruz, as the exhibit will redound to the credit of both.” She was awarded a medal of merit for her efforts.

In 1911, Howard began teaching art classes at Santa Cruz High. Her superbly crafted pen-and-ink sketches of local scenes—the Cowell Ranch lime kilns, the ruins of the Santa Cuz Mission, the local Chinatown—served to illustrate early publications of the then-monthly Santa Cruz Trident. She was also a talented landscape watercolorist, often working in a small six-by-eight-inch format en plein air, and painted scenes from Alaska to Africa, and throughout Europe. She was to have a profound impact on a generation of Santa Cruz High art students until she returned to her native Indiana in 1924.

By the end of World War I, Santa Cruz had formed its own critical mass of talented artists. In the fall of 1919, an aging Frank Heath and one of Latimer’s more talented students, Margaret E. Rogers, a force of nature in her own right, formed the Santa Cruz Art League. Heath was its initial president, Rogers its vice-president. In a formal statement issued at its first meeting, the organization declared: “For a long time it has been contemplated to organize a club or a society, for the encouragement of Art in Santa Cruz; a place through which we could come in touch with visiting artists, and they with us.” They would also use their new home, the Seabright Crafts building, to stage a steady stream of exhibits, where they could bring their work together “for discussion and criticism,” and by so doing, “stimulating us to greater efforts for advancement.”

The Art League soon became the leading cultural organization in Santa Cruz County. In March of 1920, the League held a large “Spring Exhibit” in its new and refurbished Seabright gallery space, where some 53 works by local artists were on display, including those by both Heaths, Howard, Josephine Keck, Phillip Dodge, R. Clarkson Coleman, Mabel Lemos, Sydney Lemos, Maud Klipple, and Rogers, whose watercolors, the Santa Cruz Sentinel noted, had recently appeared in an Oakland exhibit, and that “the attention they attracted there is being repeated here….She has hung also, ‘Low Tide’ [an oil], which grows upon one as it is studied: A luminous sky, whose touch of pink is reflected in the foam of the receding wave; in sharp contrast is the colors of the sea-wet rock and of the foreground, and there is movement here, you sense the pull of the out-going tide.”

By mid-decade, the Art League and its exhibits were beginning to attract regional attention. Frank Heath, who had died of cancer in 1921, had passed on the organization’s mantle to Rogers. She was clearly the engine that pulled the train. She was joined in her efforts by two close associates, Leonora Naylor Penniman, a native of Minnesota who had married into a prominent Santa Cruz business family; and Cornelia “Cor” de Gavere, a recent immigrant from Holland. Together they became known around statewide art circles as “The Santa Cruz Three.” They traveled together, went on painting excursions, and engaged other artists and art organizations throughout the West. They eventually held shows together under the rubric, from Berkeley to Sacramento to Stockton.

Rogers herself was British by birth. Born in Birmingham, England, in 1872, she and her family immigrated to southern Monterey County, near King City, in 1875, and established a ranch, not far from John Steinbeck’s grandparents, the Hamiltons, immortalized in the novel East of Eden. The young Margaret soon developed a hard-wrought reputation as one of the finest equestrians of the region. In 1893, at the age of 21, Rogers was the subject

Facing page:

Frank and Lillian Heath in front of their studio and home on Third Street, Beach Hill, Santa Cruz.

Frank and Lillian Heath in their studio and home on Third Street, circa 1900.

(Both, Geoffrey Dunn collection.)

Margaret E. Rogers (1872-1961)

“Highway Seventeen” 6 x 14 inches, Watercolor (Collection of Louis Rittenhouse.)

Below:

Detail: Close-up of an unrestored oil painting demonstrates the sure brushwork of Margaret E. Rogers, Santa Cruz Artist and co-founder of the Santa Cruz Art League. (Geoffrey Dunn collection.)

of a full-page account in the San Francisco Examiner, “A Centaur in Petticoats,” that noted “Monterey County boasts of a young woman who is as good a vaquero as is to be found in a county full of vaqueros.” The article went on to observe that she “plays classical [piano] and paints in oil” and that after “Miss Margaret E. Rogers comes in from a day on the range she is ready to entertain visitors in the parlor with music or an intelligent discussion of the latest in art and literature.”

Rogers moved to Santa Cruz in 1905, and, in 1911, began her studies with Latimer. In her unpublished memoirs, Eighty Years in California, she noted that “Mr. Latimer came to Santa Cruz three times a month in the summer [to teach]. I took lessons each year, and worked myself in between. We all strived to paint as much like him as we possibly could — with the result that we were all branded with his influence.” Indeed, many of Rogers’ earliest watercolors look so much like those of Latimer’s that they were often taken for his. But Rogers soon became known for her maritime paintings, both oils and watercolors, and she developed a broad-stroke style clearly her own.

If Rogers was a child of the open range, Leonora Naylor Penniman was born of the academy. Her father was a professor at the University of Chicago, where she studied art with Emma Siboni, and some of her early efforts were selected for the International Exposition in Paris. In the aftermath of the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, Leonora moved to Santa Cruz, where she soon married Harry Penniman and became active in his family business, Penniman Title Company. In 1919, she joined with Rogers and Heath in forming the Art League. She also continued her formal art training, spending a year under Lyonel Feinenger at Mills College and taking private lessons with the distinguished Armin Hansen in Carmel. As the one member of the Santa Cruz Three who could drive and owned a car, she was often in charge of travel arrangements. Moreover, her works were selected for exhibition in Legion of Honor shows in San Francisco, with two of her watercolors being chosen for the Legion’s permanent collection.

The most talented of the “Santa Cruz Three,” however, and, arguably, the most talented painter of her generation of regional artists, was Cor de Gavere. Born to missionary parents in the then-Dutch colony of Java (Indonesia) in 1877, she was orphaned at the age of six, and raised by an uncle in the north of Holland, where she attended public schools. On the eve of her thirtieth birthday, and trained as an assistant in pharmacy, she took up formal study at the Royal Academy of Art at The Hague. In the years preceding World War I, she moved to Paris, where she studied in the atelier of Charles Guerin, and her palette shifted from earth tones to brighter primary colors. During the war, she served as a volunteer nurse for the Red Cross.

De Gavere relocated to Santa Cruz in 1920, with a close friend, Wilhelmina Van Tonnigen, and the two became part of the city’s vital Dutch community centered in the Seabright area, to the west of Wood’s Lagoon. She quickly befriended Rogers, who also resided

Leonora Naylor Penniman, circa 1925 (Collction of Edward Penniman.)

in Seabright, and the quiet and refined Cor and the rough-and-tumble Rogers soon began weekly painting expeditions throughout the Monterey Bay area. (When Penniman and her car joined the fray, they traveled even further.) De Gavere’s work differed from others in the region quite significantly. She had far more extensive training than any of her local contemporaries (she also studied with Arthur Hill Gilbert in Monterey), and her work reflected strong European influences that were perfectly suited to the light and varied landscapes of Northern California. She once said of Santa Cruz: “I realize it’s possible [for] a place to inspire the artist and I have never wanted to leave.”

In the fall of 1927, S. Waldo Coleman, the owner of the Casa del Rey Hotel, located directly across from the Coconut Grove and Casino on the Santa Cruz waterfront, encouraged members of the Art League to stage an art exhibition as a way of inducing visitors to Santa Cruz — and his hotel — during the winter season. Rogers, Penniman, de Gavere, and their colleague at the Art League, Bertha Rose, took to the task, and the First Annual Statewide Exhibition commenced from February 1 to 15, 1928, in the Bay Room and spacious sun parlors of the Casa del Rey. By all accounts, the first statewide exhibition was a wild success. Some of the state’s best known artists, including Burton Boundey, Benjamin Brown, William Clapp, Phil Dike, Jade Fon, Selden Connor Gile, Emile Kosa, Otis Oldfield, Millard Sheets, Gunnar Widforss, and Karl Yens participated in the inaugural exhibition. Works by several well-known local artists, including Margaret King Rocle, Luther de Joiner, Josephine Keck, along with those by Rogers, de Gavere and Penniman, were also exhibited.

For more than three decades, the Santa Cruz statewide was one of the pre-eminent exhibitions in California. Several more of the state’s top landscape painters entered their works during this era, including Frank H. Cutting, Jade Fon, Albert DeRome, John DeVincenzi, Armin Hansen, Jerome Jones, Paul Lauritz, Laura Maxwell, Thomas McGlynn, Mary DeNeale Morgan, George Demont Otis, Charles Reiffel, William Ritschel, Louis Siegriest and Nell Walker Warner. And a growing list of prominent local artists also participated in the annual exhibition, including Jean and Jon Blanchett, Claude and Leslie Buck, G.C. McGreggor-Gregg, Maude Klipple, Lillie May Nicholson, Mildred Norman, Hazel Rittenhouse, Marion Ross, and Clarence Taubenheim. When there was a question of continuing the annual exhibit, de Gavere was adamant: “If we do not undertake this, I will not feel it worthwhile staying in Santa Cruz.” The show went on.

Well into the 1950s, when the exhibition began shifting to a more local focus, Santa Cruz businesses sponsored entries in the annual affair by placing advertisements in area newspapers featuring the works of local artists. “Art Week” was celebrated in the city with a series of festivities, including a grand opening reception to the statewide, with the entire community embracing the exhibition. And for two weeks every year, Santa Cruz assumed center stage in the world of California landscape painting.•

Cor De Gavere (1877-1955)

“Pacheco Creek,” DeLaveaga Park, Santa Cruz 24 x 18 inches, Oil (Geoffrey Dunn collection.)

Geoffrey Dunn is an award-winning journalist, historian and filmmaker. He is the author of Santa Cruz Is in the Heart and served as editor of Chinatown Dreams: The Life and Photographs of George Lee. He was the recipient of a Gail Rich Award in 2002 for his many and varied contributions to the arts community in Santa Cruz County.

Awarded Paintings 2007

Jurors’ comments:

This painting had such graphic impact that when it was screened we reacted strongly. We were all taken by the powerful sense of place, composition, crafsmanship and color use. We felt this painting was a winner from the instant we saw it.

Aaron Johnson “Watsonville Apples” 60 x 38 inches

Grand Prize / Best of Show First Place Oils

Second Place Oils

Marnie Dufau

“Dunes at Ocean Beach”

20 x 16 inches

Jurors’ comments:

The sea peeking over the dune’s path is a simple and pleasing composition inviting the eye and heart to the seashore.

Third Place Oils

Tim Sloan

“High Sierra” 64 x 48 inches

Jurors’ comments:

A painting in the tradition of the “grand view.” Colorful and high key, the work captures the pristine beauty of this untouched natural setting.

First Place Watercolor

Jurors’ comments:

Nice and loose; the depiction of water is where watercolor shines as a medium. This work is dynamic, yet calming at the same time.

John Ploeger

“Neary Lagoon”

12 x 18 inches

Second Place Watercolor

Rose Sloan “Garapata”

Big Sur 24 x 20 inches

Jurors’ comments:

Crisp and clean use of the medium of watercolor. Bold, simple shapes built with a pleasing, muted palette.

Third Place Watercolor

Hank Zauderer “Pastoral Evening”

30 x 22 inches

Jurors’ comments:

Tone and color reminiscent of California watercolorists of the late 1930s. The colorful cluster of buildings seems to echo a European past.

Jurors’ comments:

Vivid color captures this curious intersection of natural elements. One may easily imagine being in this quiet and beautiful location.

Peggy Marketello

“Shady Respite by the Bend” 24 x 18 inches

First Place Pastel

Second Place Pastel

Abigail Stryker “Cliff” 15 x 15 inches

Jurors’ comments:

A very interesting composition reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe. A dramatic, distant view, yet with the presence of a close-up. A very unusual and stark landscape configuration.

Third Place Pastel

Sandra Cherk “Watery Road” 26 x 18 inches

Jurors’ comments:

A classic landscape composition leading the eye to a man-made scar, now healing, on a California rolling hillside. A sense of mystery is created by the wet road reflecting the sky.

Acknowledgements

Ed Penniman

Geoffrey Dunn, Louis Rittenhouse and Mark Farina deserve credit for their help with the exhibit. Thank you Geoffrey Dunn for enthusiastically taking charge of writing the historical essay in this book, tying Santa Cruz to the California Plein Air Movement at the turn of the century and introducing the historical element of the Santa Cruz Three to the exhibit. Also to Louis Rittenhouse for helping to select the pieces and for the wit he brought to the lengthy screening process; and for his support of the exhibit and allowing us to reproduce a painting from his extensive California landscape collection in this catalog. Also, Mark Farina, a notable fine artist and painting teacher from our artistic sister city Pacific Grove, for guiding the process of jurying and allowing us to use his painting on the cover of this catalog and all the supporting promotional materials. It has been my pleasure to coordinate the exhibit and design and produce this catalog.

On behalf of the Santa Cruz Art League staff, board of directors and membership, I want to thank sincerely the following sponsors: Santa Cruz Memorial, The Ow Family Businesses, Palace Stationery, Lenz Arts, Geoffrey Dunn, The Good Times, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Ed Penniman Design, Bay Federal Credit Union, Shoreline Printing, and other sponsors who may have contributed to our effort after this catalog went to press. Thanks are also in order for the Santa Cruz Art League Board of Directors, staff and volunteer members who have approved, coordinated and worked to bring this show to you.

Panel of Jurors

Ed Penniman: Principle Curator

Graphic Designer, Painter, Writer and Poet

Santa Cruz, California

Ed Penniman graduated BFA from Chouinard Art School of California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, where he studied with Herbert Jepson, Watson Cross and Emerson Woelffer, Frederick Hammersley and others. He was hired at Carson-Roberts Advertising (Ogilvy-Mather Advertising) as an Art Director. Later, as a Graphic Designer, he won awards for corporate identity, packaging, and trade advertising. Communication Arts Magazine did a feature article on him, and examples of his work have been published in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Ed followed the painting trail of Winslow Homer to Eleuthera in the Bahamas, has painted throughout Europe, the United States, Latin America, South Pacific and the West Indies. In 2006 his first poetry book, In Memoriam Innocentium, was published, featuring poems of personal growth and spiritual healing from quadriplegia.

Geoffrey

Dunn, Ph.

D. Writer, Historian, Filmmaker, Art Historian and Collector

Santa

Cruz, California

Geoffrey Dunn is an award-winning filmmaker, historian and journalist. He has published more than 75 articles on regional history and is a regular contributor to a variety of western publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle. He has received the prestigious Gail Rich Award for contributions

Revisiting the Romance of the California Landscape

to the arts in Santa Cruz County. His films include Day on the Bay; Dollar a Day, Ten Cents a Dance; Mi Vida: The Three Worlds of Maria Gutierrez; Miss or Myth?; Chinese Gold (based on the book by Sandy Lydon); Maddalena Z; and Santa Cruz County: A Home Movie Scrap Book; and Calypso Dreams. He was also the editor of Chinatown Dreams: The Life and Photographs of George Lee. He serves as a Lecturer in Community Studies Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received an Excellence in Teaching Award. Geoffrey Dunn is an avid and knowledgeable collector of California landscape painting from 1800 to 1940 and has published widely on the subject.

Louis Rittenhouse Rittenhouse Building & Investments Developer, Art Collector Santa Cruz, California

Louis Rittenhouse is President of Rittenhouse Building and Investments. He graduated with a BS from the University of Santa Clara in 1972. Mr. Rittenhouse has been a major investor in the city of Santa Cruz. He served as the President of the Santa Cruz Downtown Business Association and also served on the Santa Cruz City Council from 1990 to 1994. He has many interests, and he is an art collector of the Early California Masters.

Mark Farina Oil Painter, Watercolorist, Art Teacher Pacific Grove, California

Born in Miami in 1946, Mark Farina was raised in upstate New York. He received a golf scholarship to Florida State University, where he became interested in art, graduating with a B.A. in Art and Art History. Later he spent six months studying art history in Florence. Farina began concentrating on fine art, painting and teaching in the mid-1990s. Since then his work has been accepted in several juried shows, and he won numerous awards throughout the United States. He continues teaching on the Monterey Peninsula at the Carmel Adult School, Monterey Peninsula College, the Carmel Foundation and the Pacific Grove Art Center. A member of the Carmel Art Association since April 2003, Farina is a resident of Pacific Grove, where he also maintains a studio.

Leonora N. Penniman (1884-1957)

“Schwan Lagoon” East Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz 22 x 17 inches, Plein Air, Oil, 1932 (Penniman Family Collection.)

Romance of the California Landscape: Selected Bibliography

Cor de Gavere (1877-1955)

“Bonny Doon” 20 x 14 inches, Oil (Geoffrey Dunn collection.)

Michael D. Brown, Views from Asian California, 1920-1965 (1992)

Iona M. Chelette, et al., California Grandeur and Genre (1991)

Wanda M. Corn, The Color of Mood: American Tonalism, 1880-1910 (1972)

Brother Cornelius, Keith: Old Master of California, Vols. I and II (1942/1956)

Christina Orr-Cahall, The Art of California: Selected Works from the Collection of the Oakland Museum (1992)

Geoffrey Dunn, Chinatown Dreams: The Life and Photography of George Lee (2002)

Ann Hethcock, Visions of their Own: Four Monterey Bay Artists of the Depression Era (1990)

Edan Milton Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940 (2002)

Margaret Koch, Frank and Lillian Heath: Towards Artistic Development (Date Unknown)

Eugen Neuhaus, The Art of the Exposition (1915)

Bruce Porter, et al., Art in California: A Survey (1916/1988)

Charles Prentiss and Nikki Silva, Art and Artists in Santa Cruz: A Historic Survey (1973)

Christopher Riopelle, Manet to Picasso: The National Gallery (2007)

Margaret Rogers, Eighty Years in California (Unpublished: 1957)

Scott A. Shields, Artists at Continent’s End: The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, 1875-1907 (2007)

Nikki Silva, Cor de Gavere: Paintings and Drawings (1974)

Helen Spangenberg, Yesterday’s Artists on the Monterey Peninsula (1976)

Jean Stern and William H. Gerdts, Masters of Light: Plein Air Paintings in California, 1890-1930 (2002)

Patricia Trenton and William H. Gerdts, California Light: 1900-1930 (1992)

Jean Van Nostrand and Edith M. Coulter, California Pictorial (1948)

Ada King Wallis (ed.), The Western Woman: Presenting Artists of the Santa Cruz Area (circa 1950)

Ruth Lilly Westphal, Plein Air Painters of California: The North (1986)

Ruth Lilly Westphal, Plein Air Painters of California: The Southland (1982)

Revisiting the Romance of the California Landscape

Selected Artists : : 2007

77th Annual Statewide Exhibition

Skip

Marnie

Yeshe

Virgina

Ara

Peggy

Terrence

Revisiting the Romance of the California Landscape

The First Annual California Statewide Exhibition was inaugurated from February 1 to 15, 1928, in the Bay Room and spacious sun parlors of the Casa del Rey Hotel, located directly across from the Coconut Grove and Casino on the Santa Cruz Waterfront. The exhibition was largely the brainchild of legendary Santa Cruz painters Margaret Rogers, Cor de Gavere and Leonora Naylor Penniman, who were noted around the state’s art circles as “The Santa Cruz Three.” Rogers, a fine watercolorist who had studied with L.P. Latimer, was the driving force of the group; de Gavere, who had trained in her native Holland, was the most talented painter of the trio, and a quiet presence behind the scene; Penniman, accomplished in both watercolors and oils, was the glue that held the triumvirate together.

Revisiting the Romance of the California Landscape includes introductory comments on the 2007 statewide exhibition by principle curator Edward Penniman and a history of plein air painting in California and Santa Cruz by Geoffrey Dunn. It also includes previously unpublished photographs and works of art, as well as a selected bibliography on California painting and a selection of awardwinning works from the 2007 exhibition.