Bag of Tricks: Instructional Activities and Games

Janet Blake

Susan Ryberg

Love Publishing Co.

Miss Hills of Laguna Beach, Anna Althea Hills: art, education, community

Laguna Art Museum

Phil Dike grew up in Redlands, California, and studied at the Chouinard School of Art in Los Angeles from 1924 to 1927. There, he met artist Millard Sheets (1907-1989), who would become a lifelong friend. Dike went to New York in 1929 to study at the Art Students League. He also studied in the studio of artist George Luks (1867-1933) and exhibited with Luks's students at the New York Water Color Club. Returning to Los Angeles, he taught at Chouinard for a year before traveling to Europe and studying for a year in France at the American Academy of Fontainebleau. He resumed teaching at Chouinard in 1931; then, in 1935, he became a color coordinator and story designer for Walt Disney Studios, contributing to such animated classics as Fantasia and Snow White. His tenure with Disney lasted until 1945. With an educational background that was grounded in realism, Dike was a prominent member of the California regionalist movement of the 1930s and 1940s. A close friend of artist Rex Brandt (1914-2000), the two founded the Brandt-Dike Summer School in 1947 at Brandt's home in Corona del Mar. In 1950, Dike joined the faculty of Scripps College and the Claremont Graduate Schools. At this time, he abandoned a strictly realist approach and began to abstract his forms. By the 1960s, his work had reached nearly pure abstraction. The dominant subject matter of his work was the sea and man's relationship to it. Bustling beach and harbor scenes dominated his subject matter in the 1930s and 1940s. However, as his work became more abstract, the human elements were reduced to mystical forms, and the elements of sky, sea, and sand were reduced to striated, textured patterns. Dike retired from teaching in 1970 but continued to make his home in Claremont. As a professor emeritus, he influenced many young artists long after his retirement. In his last decades, Dike, a sensitive man, also wrote poetry that expressed his feelings about the sea and man's relationship to it.

Phil Dike: At the Edge of the Sea

Art Colony The Laguna Beach Art Association, 1918-1935

Deborah Epstein Solon

"Thomas Lorraine Hunt (1882-1938) was the son of the well-known Canadian Impressionist painter John Powell Hunt. He spent much of his early life in Cleveland, Ohio, but became active with the Laguna Beach Art Association in the early 1920s and moved permanently to Laguna Beach in 1927. He played a large part in the creation of the association's new gallery on Cliff Drive (now the museum), which opened in 1929. Hunt painted snowy landscapes in Canada, Cleveland, and the Sierras, although he is best known for the coastal and harbor scenes that he painted in Southern California and during regular visits to Gloucester, Massachusetts. A masterful, innovative colorist, he developed a distinctive style characterized by broad brushwork and bold effects of light and reflection. The first solo exhibition of Hunt's work was held shortly after his death and there has been no other since then. Comprising more than fifty of Hunt's paintings, Thomas Hunt: California Modernist is curated by Janet Blake, the museum's curator of historical art, in collaboration with early California art researcher Keith Colestock. The fully illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition will feature a biographical essay by Colestock presenting material to augment and correct the scant accounts of Hunt's life published to date, as well as an essay by Blake discussing his influences and the evolution of his style"--

Thomas Hunt California Modernist

Poet with a Brush

Katherine Halligan

George Stern Fine Arts

A Tapestry of Life: The World of Millard Sheets

Tony Sheets

Millard Sheets Center

A beautifully illustrated and exeptional book. Tthe first fully comprehensive book on one of California's most important artists. Contains a complete bibliography, a checklist of the exhibit, chronology and essays on Wendt's life and art. 320pp. 305 Color and 32 Color Illus. ISBN 978-0-9821201-0-1.

In Nature's Temple, the Life and Art of William Wendt

Will South

Jean Stern

The Irvine Museum-Laguna Art Museum

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Books by Janet Blake