Style & Genre Essays California Style: Artist Research

Style & Genre Essays

California Style

A movement in watercolor painting that flourished in California between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s and "gave the traditional watercolor medium a bold new look". Leaders were a group of young artists studying at the Chouinard Art Institute and included Millard Sheets, Phil Dike, Lee Blair, Tom Craig, Barse Miller, Paul Sample, Hardie Gramatky, Emil Kosa, Jr., James Patrick, and Phil Paradise. These early exponents of the California Style were members of the California Water Color Society. They and their followers painted boldly and directly in realist style onto large sheets of paper with minimal sketching and often allowed the white of the paper to show through. Their subject matter was the landscape and genre of Southern California. In Northern California, representative leaders were Dong Kingman, George Post, and Maurice Logan. Source: Gordon McClelland and Jay Last, "The California Style"