Harold Gretzner was a Bay Area treasure. As a regional watercolor master, he painted scenes of San Francisco, the Bay and surrounding areas. His paintings are a bit gritty, urban and industrial. His preferred subjects included streets, docks, warehouses, boats, old houses and Chinatown.

Gretzner was born in Baltimore. He trained at the Washington School of Art in Washington D.C. and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

He worked in San Francisco as an artist-lithographer for thirty years. An interview with his widow, Teckla Gretzner, revealed that Harold's routine was to get up before dawn, begin his drive to work in San Francisco. But most days, he would stop along the way to paint. This is a discipline he maintained for years.

Gretzner was a close friend and painting partner of Maurice Logan (one of Oakland's Society of Six). Both Gretzner and Logan were associated with the Thirteen Watercolorists (of Oakland) and the West Coast Watercolor Society. The Thirteen Watercolorists held annual exhibitions in San Francisco during the late 1930's until 1947. Harold, after retiring from his lithography job in 1960, devoted his time to painting and was a popular watercolor teacher. For many summers, Harold Gretzner co-taught watercolor classes at Asilomar Conference Center in Monterey with his friend, water color painter, Jade Fon.

His paintings are in the UC Irvine Langson Museum, the Buck Collection, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Hilbert Museum of California Art in Orange, California.

California Style Watercolor combines direct observation of the subject, use of wet-into-wet transparent color, with bold design accompanied with an unusually strong sense of light. It is less concerned with detail and more with atmosphere of a particular time and a place.

Gretzner's style began with controlled wet into wet with broad passages of diffused pigment establishing atmosphere and light. Then with applied calligraphic strokes, he provided structure and definition. He doesn't attempt to portray any scene accurately. Instead he seeks to capture the atmosphere, light and rhythmic forms, usually with a visual anchor.

Note -- Regarding our gallery's painting Coit Tower above, the January 9, 1997 edition of the the LA TIMES reviewed California Watercolors of the Jonathan Art Foundation and the Jonathan Club at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard. They described Coit Tower which was on view as part of this exhibition as "a spire on a hill amid a meandering group of ramshackle houses."

The LA Times article characterized the San Francisco paintings of this exhibition as "a kind of glowing light." It placed Gretzner among the California Style watercolor painters who transformed urban subjects. Rather than presenting the harsh, congested city environment, these California Style watercolor painters softened their scenes into atmosphere and light, with architecture being only part of the whole scene.