OPEN HOUSE ... LABOR DAY WEEKEND (Fri, Sat, & Sun, 12:00 - 5:00 PM) ... We are hosting an OPEN HOUSE at Linda Sorensen's artist studio and Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery's showroom. Linda has a lovely group of paintings on exhibit as she prepares for this year's Art Trails, and Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery offers our first Atelier One exhibition of Joshua Meador paintings, featuring our Disney and Meador Family Collections as well as a selection of our own Joshua Meador paintings.

Friday August 31 our building, Atelier One at 2860 Bowen Street in Graton, is open up to 5:00 p.m. Come on in -- we're in Studio 5 at the far left end of the ground floor, from noon to 5:00 p.m.

Saturday and Sunday, the Atelier One building is locked. To gain access, go to Atelier One's uphill door (on the South end of the building, see photo above.) You should be able to see us through, and knock on, the corner window. Or phone or text. We will come open the gate up the ramp, noon to 5:00 p.m.

Joshua Meador was a mid century regional impressionist. He loved the California Coast, often staying in Bodega Bay as he painted throughout Sonoma County.

Joshua Meador graduated with honors from the Art Institute in Chicago in 1935. In the midst of the Great Depression Josh was thrilled to land an opportunity at Walt Disney Studios. He quickly rose to become the studio's Director of Animation Effects for nearly 30 years.

What do an American WWII general, a Hollywood star and a Russian Revolutionary have in common?

Their portraits were done by Russian-American artist Nicolai Fechin. Nicolai was an international painting phenomenon from Russia before he came to America. His stellar career was the reason he was able to exhibit in New York City and later establish himself as an American artist in Taos and Southern California.

Nicolai Fechin's most improbable biography began in Kazan, Russia, about 500 miles due east of Moscow. He was an exceptional art student at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and traveled throughout Europe and even to America on a scholarship. There he made contacts which eventually allowed him to escape Russia and the years of deprivation and hardship caused by the Russian Revolution.

Throughout his career, Fechin maintained friendships with a wide circle of artists. Soon after his arrival in New York, his friendship with the famous New York illustrator and cartoonist Clyde Forsythe and his artist friend John Burnham proved quite valuable.

Forsythe and Burnham pressed the gallery for Fechin's New York address and visited him in his modest New York flat. Despite the language barrier, they became friends at once.

In 1927, Fechin contracted tuberculosis, and on the best medical advice, relocated his wife and daughter to Taos, New Mexico. He was drawn there by the Taos Society of Artists, including Joseph Henry Sharp, Ernest Blumenschein, Irving Couse, Oscar Berninghaus, Bert Phillips, and Buck Dunton.

The Taos Society of Artists shared Fechin's passion for native people. Fechin first came to love aboriginal people as an art student while visiting Siberia in 1904.

Ed Ainsworth writes, "In Taos, the immemorial Indian village beyond Sante Fe, Nicolai settled, reveling in the immense spaces, the unbelievable brilliance of the atmosphere, the patient plodding Indians, the red, yellow and dun cliffs and mountains. With his own hands, he built a dwelling of native materials.

From the gnarled woods of the mesas and hillsides he began carving heads and figures. Onto his canvases he transplanted all the people and scenes that stirred his imagination so mightily. Fechin loved Taos, especially his Indian friends, many of whom posed for him."

Today, Fechin's house is home to the Taos Art Museum, and displays work by Fechin and works by the Taos Society of Artists. The home itself is part of the museum, and has now been placed on the National Register of Historic places.

Six years after having built his Taos home, Fechin and his wife Alexandra divorced. Nicolai left Taos and soon after moved to Los Angeles. Alexandra remained in the Taos home until her death in 1983.

Nicolai spent the last 22 years of his career in Southern California. Immediately after the divorce, he traveled to Southern California, Mexico, Japan, and Java and Bali in Indonesia. When he returned, he purchased a home in Hollywood and some years later, he moved to Santa Monica. To maintain his livelihood, he did portraits for wealthy clients and celebrities and continued painting for himself, often indulging his passion for native American subjects.

Over the years, Nicolai's old friendship with Clyde Forsythe and John Burnham reasserted itself. They introduced Fechin to a wide circle of artists, especially the California Desert painters. Burnham had a house in Palm Springs. It wasn't so much of a house as it was a compound with a main house, a two bedroom guest house and three bungalows. The Burnham compound was located just down the block from artist Gordon Coutts' home.

Coutts was a renowned artist and entertainer. He was a member of San Francisco's Bohemian Club who relocated to Palm Springs for health reasons. Coutts built a desert castle for himself,

modeled in the motif of castles he had known in Tangiers, and named it "Dar Marroc." Today, his former home is an historic hotel named Korakia. When owned by Coutts, it was a center of Palm Springs culture, with visiting friends and artists such as Nicolai Fechin and Grant Wood. Other notable guests to Coutts' Dar Marroc studio were friends, Winston Churchill and Rudolph Valentino.

Meanwhile, down the block from the famed Gordon Coutts, John Burnham rented out his smaller cottages to LA artists to make Burnham's bungalows into their visiting Palm Springs studios. Nicolai Fechin, Jimmy Swinnerton and Maynard Dixon were among them. According to Forbes magazine, Burnham's artist compound was Palm Springs first gated community.

During one of Fechin's stays in Palm Springs, a young unknown artist, but a good friend of Forsythe, Swinnerton and Dixon came to meet Nicolai.

In the 1930's, John W. Hilton was young with lots of black hair and made his livelihood from a gem shop and art gallery in Thermal, south of Indio. He had already studied privately with Maynard Dixon. Hilton was overjoyed to learn Fechin was staying in Palm Springs for the winter, and seized the opportunity when he learned that Nicolai hated to drive. John Hilton became Nicolai's driver, and introduced Nicolai to scenic places throughout the desert and to the local native Americans Hilton knew so well. In exchange, Fechin offered to criticize Hilton's work.

Hilton spoke of his relationship with Fechin in The Man Who Captured Sunshine by Katherine Ainsworth. He said, "Nicolai was a small intense man with steely, penetrating blue eyes. It was a though he possessed an inner smoldering fire of creativity and those eyes looked keenly into another person's soul and all shoddiness was burned away. With Nicolai, a person's petty meannesses and false pretenses shrank and disappeared."

After Nicolai's death in 1955, Nicolai was initially buried in Santa Monica. Twenty-one years later, in 1976, his daughter Eya took Nicolai's remains back to his home town of Kazan, Russia.

Today, Russians proudly consider Nicolai Fechin as one of their country's greatest painters. Kazan's Museum of Fine Arts is home to the largest collection of Fechin works.

paintings until they became almost pure evocations of light and mood. Rothko deeply admired Turner, but in his own day, Turner was not universally appreciated. Many Victorian curators considered his work too odd for public view.

As a young painter, Turner tried to please the Royal Academy in London, which, at the time, was promoting the Grand Style of painting, epitomized by classical or biblical narratives by painters like Titian, Poussin, Rembrandt or Claude Lorraine. To this classical style, Turner evolved his use of light and color to express mood.

Turner looked to mythology, history and the Bible for stories he wished to tell, with his expressive atmospheric style. He was particularly interested in ancient Carthage and created a number of works including Hannibal's crossing of the alps.

Visitors to the Tate Britain
admiring JMW Turner's Self Portrait,
age 22, c 179

He also used current events. Turner was fascinated by Napoleon. In War, the Exile and the Rock Limpet he shows

Napoleon in exile framed by a blood red sky, symbolic of a life surrounded by carnage. Turner's use of Biblical themes seems to have been motivated by fulfilling an expectation of a number of his patrons. Artists were expected to create such scenes. Turner's painting seems to express no theological bent or preference. Turner liked the stories or themes which allowed him to follow in the footsteps of the masters such as Titian, or to dazzle the eye with effects as in the Tenth Plague of Egypt.

Aeneas and the Sibyl Lake Avernus, 1798 ... At age 23, this may be Turner's first attempt at a mythological subject. This picture illustrates a story from the Aeneid by the poet Virgil. Aeneas wants to visit the ghost of his father, whom he believes can be reached with the aid of the Cumaean Sibyl as his guide by Lake Avernus.The painting was never exhibited, other than for display at Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Turner's patron.

Jason, 1802 ... Turner first exhibited this painting at the Royal Academy and later in Plymouth. Here, Turner shows Jason overcoming the dragon in his quest for the Golden Fleece. It is believed young Turner, aged 27 when this was painted, was seeking to impress others with his knowledge of classical legends and literature.

The Hero of a Hundred Fights, 1800-10 ... This painting shows the moment when a bronze statue of the Duke of Wellington was removed from its mould. The figure is obscured by the intense fire light of the foundry. The effect is to transform the statue of Wellington into an ethereal presence. He uses tone and color to add power and force to a national hero.

The Tenth Plague of Egypt, 1802 ... The subject of this painting is the last and the most horrific of the ten plagues inflicted on the Egyptians for enslaving the Jewish people, the killing of their first born sons. The threatening atmospheric effects emphasize the power of forces beyond mankind's control. Turner exhibited this painting a couple of months after being admitted a full member of the Royal Academy, intended to impress viewers with his skills in the highest branch of painting, "historical grand style."

Holy Family, 1803 ... In his earlier works, young Turner sought to measure his style against the old masters, not as he later did with his contemporaries. This work was done a year after he studied at the Louvre. At that time, Titian's St. Peter Martyr was hanging in Paris, having been moved there from Venice by Napoleon's troops. Turner used that painting as a source for this work.

The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides, 1806 ... The Hesperides were the three daughters of Hesperus, the evening star. They tended a tree of golden apples on the slopes of Mount Atlas. Here, the goddess Discord picks one, setting in train the events leading to the Trojan war. The apple was subsequently awarded to the goddess Aphrodite by Paris, after she had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world: the Greek Queen, Helen, wife of Menelaus, whom Paris then abducted. It seems Turner may have been alluding to recent in-fighting at the Royal Academy in his choice of subject.

Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, 1812 ... 1812 was a momentous year. Napoleon was attacking Russia and then for us Americans, 1812 was the year the British burned down the White House in Washington, D.C. For Turner, this painting of Hannibal had much to do with the powerful threat of Napoleon. Turner does not praise Napoleon, rather contrasts his miniscule power against the overwhelming force of nature. Hannibal is not pictured. The focus here is on the victims of the conflict, the hardships experienced by the struggling soldiers. There is one elephant pictured, quite small with its trunk faintly silhouetted on the horizon.

The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, 1817 ... 17th century painter Claude Lorrain was Turner's favorite old master. This painting was done in Lorrain's style with the decline of Carthage symbolized by the setting sun. Turner believed the fall of empires was inevitable, confirmed by the fall of Napoleon, and remaining a threat to the British Empire.

The Bay of Baiae with Apollo and the Sibyl, 1823 ... The ancient Roman town of Baiae is located on the northwest shore of the Bay of Naples. In Roman times, it was a fashionable resort for the wealthy. It was the scene of hedonistic offerings and a place known for corruption and scandal. Seismic activity rased and lowered its topography, submerging a large portion of the town. Today, ruins make up a large submerged archaeological park. Turner uses this town as the backdrop for the mythological story of Apollo and the Cumeaean Sibyl. The Sibyl asks the Roman god to give her years of life equal to the number of grains of sand she can hold in her hand. But, she failed to ask for eternal youth. So, over time, she deteriorated until only her voice remained. The cautionary tale Turner is telling here is that time has wrought changes to the Roman architecture, but the golden beauty of the landscape remains undiminished.

Rocky Bay with Figures, 1827 ... This unfinished painting was intended to be a mythologically themed painting from Homer's Odyssey. It is a Mediterranean scene with a suggestion of figures on the beach with ancient ships just off shore.

The Fall of Anarchy, 1833-34 ... Until recently, this painting was known as Death on a Pale Horse, a reference to the last of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Biblical book of Revelation. New research though proposes the painting was instead a response to a political poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy, written in 1819 and published in 1832. Shelly wrote, "Last came Anarchy: he rode ... On a white horse, splashed with blood; ... He was pale even to the lips ...Like death in the Apocalypse.

The Opening of the Wallhalla, 1842 ... Turner visited Germany seven times between 1817 and 1844. The fall of Napoleon brought on a revival of German culture. In 1842, Wallhalla Temple (Turner's own spelling) was opened on the shores of the Danube by King Ludwig of Bavaria as a symbol of national unity, a monument to great Germans of the past. This painting combines symbols of the arts and weapons, both used in the German struggle to free itself from French domination. In 1845, Turner sent this painting to Munich, but it was poorly received.

The Exile and the Rock Limpet, 1842 ... In the same year Napoleon's ashes were returned to France, Turner created this painting. Napoleon is pictured in exile on the Island of St. Helena. Turner neither glorifies nor demonizes him, but rather paints a picture which shows the futility of conflict. Here, Napoleon is pictured standing alone, while the red around him shows the trauma of battle. In poetic verse attached to the canvas, Turner refers to the red as a "sea of blood."

The Angel Standing in the Sun, 1846 ... This painting shows the Archangel Michael wielding his flaming sword on Judgment Day. Scenes below include Adam and Eve weeping over the body of their murdered son Abel, and lesser known story of Judith standing over the beheaded body of Holofernes.

The book of Judith is not included in the canon of the Bible, and is not well known today, but would have been in Turner's time. It contains the intriguing story of Judith, a beautiful Jewish woman upset with her countrymen for not trusting God to deliver them from the foreign conqueror, Holofernes. The story tells of Judith going to the enemy camp, ingratiating herself and promising information on the Israelites, thus gaining the trust of Holofernes. Her deceit is successful, and she is invited into his tent. While he is in a drunken stupor, she takes Holofernes own sword and decapitates him, returning to her countrymen with his head, saving her people from domination.

Undine Giving the Ring to Massaniello, Fisherman of Naples, 1846 ... This painting is based on a fairy tale by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque published in 1811. The fairy tale was later performed as a ballet in London. The story is of "Ondine," born without a soul, but believes she can acquire a soul if she marries Juldebrand, a knight. But, she falls in love with "Massaniello," a revolutionary fisherman of Naples.

Mercury Sent to Admonish Aeneus, 1850 ... In the Latin epic poem, Virgil's Aeneid, the Italian Aeneas loves Dido, the Queen of Carthage. Here, Aeneas stands on shore under the spell of Cupid while the god Mercury waited to tell him he was neglecting his fleet off shore. Mercury seems not discernible, seemingly melted into thin air as Aeneas remains unwilling to leave Dido, transfixed under Cupid's spell.

OPEN HOUSE ... LABOR DAY WEEKEND, Aug 31, Sep 1 & 2 (Fri, Sat, & Sun, 12:00 - 5:00 PM) ... We are hosting an OPEN HOUSE at Linda Sorensen's studio and Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery's showroom. Linda has a lovely group of paintings on exhibit as she prepares for this year's Art Trails, and Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery has our Joshua Meador exhibition, featuring our Disney Collection, Meador Family Collection, and the best of our own Joshua Meador paintings. We are available for appointments on Monday, Sep 3.

See top of Newsletter for details of access.

John Singer Sargent and Chicago's Gilded Age is showing at the Art Instititute in Chicago through September 30.

If you're close by, it's a MUST SEE.

Beyond her Atelier One studio, Linda Sorensen's paintings are currently showing at

Sixth Street Playhouse studio gallery in Santa Rosa in the Railroad Square area. Giclee/prints are available of her popular paintings, in addition to original oil paintings.

Bodega Landmark Gallery Collection,
located inland in the town of Bodega, west end of town a half block from the Casino, and just across from the (vacant) General Store and the Bodega Volunteer Fire Department.

Corrick's "Art Trails Gallery,
located in downtown Santa Rosa on 4th Street, just steps from Santa Rosa's reopened Town Square.

Bentonville, AR
Crystal Bridges
Museum of American Art

... IN GRATON, CA ...
Linda Sorensen's studio and Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery's showroom is now is located in Atelier One, Graton. You may view all paintings in Linda Sorensen's or Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery's online offerings. Call or email for an appointment.

... IN YOUR HOME ... Call or email for a an appointment. For a fee, we'll bring the art to you (up to 200 miles from Bodega Bay). Sales above $5,000, the travel fee is refunded.

... ON LINE ... Call or email about pieces which interest you. We offer FedEx shipping (included in price) in the U.S for major purchases.