Draft:Blaine Larson

[Franklin] Blaine Gledhill Larson[-Crowther] (13 July 1937 – 24 November 2022), known as Blaine Larson, was a prominent American post-war abstract expressionist artist and educator allied with the Washington Color Painters active in the vibrant Washington DC area art scene centred around the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design and the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century.

Though often included in the second generation of Color Painters, like Leon Berkowitz, he rejected the label for his own work, insisting he was sui generis. According to Andrew Hudson, former art critic for the Washington Post, he was the “Master of Diamond Painting”. He was known for going against “safe taste”, his encyclopedic knowledge of art, and his marvellous eye.

Early Years
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Blaine Cowley Larson, a deputy state auditor, and Margaret Gledhill Larson, a concert pianist, he was named after his maternal grandfather, Franklin Gledhill. Within three months, his father passed away, succumbing to a case of Bright’s disease, inducing his mother to rename him Blaine, in honor of her beloved spouse. Growing up in Salt Lake City, Blaine lived with his widowed mother at his grandparents' house. She was a concert pianist and was often called upon to play the piano in various venues. During these times, Blaine ended up in the care of his grandmother a great deal. She was a strong-willed woman who was very strict in all the ways that would make a young boy want to rebel. Grade school wasn’t much better. Blaine described his elementary school teachers as being “absolutely horrid”. There was only one teacher whom Blaine regarded as kind, a trait which he attributes to her habit of taking a nip of alcohol in the afternoons. In contrast to his grandmother, Blaine’s grandfather was a kind and caring man who would tell great stories. Sometimes, Blaine would be sent down to the local bar to bring him home at night, much to the chagrin of his strict grandmother.

Blaine took up “drawing everything” from an early age and admired the works of Aubrey Beardsley and Salvador Dalí.

After his grandfather died, Blaine’s mother moved to Los Angeles, California, to be closer to her sister. When Blaine was 11 years old, his mother married Hearl Crowther. Hearl legally adopted Blaine, so his name changed again, and he became Blaine Larson-Crowther. Hearl was a dental surgeon, and the family moved to Northern California near Berkeley. At some point in the late 60’s, Blaine dropped Crowther from his name.

Education and Peace Corps
Larson graduated from San Leandro High School in 1955 and then enrolled at the University of California–Berkeley. He started in Sociology and German Translation, then joined the Debate Team, where he excelled. Berkeley is where he met his first wife, Rayna Gay Pace. She was studying to get her master’s degree in psychology. Rayna noted that Blaine loved to draw and would draw anything and everything. He was in the process of discovering that he wanted to be a painter — and after a year at Brigham Young University, he had enrolled at the Mills College and San Francisco School of Fine Arts and studied under Ansel Adams at the Yosemite Workshops. Rayna and Blaine married on August 2, 1957. Eventually, they went to American University in Washington, DC, to finish their education. After attending John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, they accepted the presidential challenge and, within months, were through their Peace Corps training at Pennsylvania State University and on their way to work and teach in the Philippines.

As one of the few married couples joining the Peace Corps, they were entrusted with leadership positions over the single volunteers. They worked in various parts of the country in different capacities. Still, they showed their talents when they began working on a TV show called English as a Key on TV5 (Philippine TV network) produced by Robert F. Chandler Jr. It was one of the first educational TV programs in the Philippines. It aimed to improve the English proficiency of Filipino students and teachers, as well as to promote cultural exchange and understanding between the two countries. Blaine taught in front of the camera for the adults and ran the puppet show behind the scenes while Rayna worked with the children. After over a year in service, Blaine contracted a tropical disease and developed a severe kidney infection. He was hospitalized and lost a lot of weight. With his father’s history of kidney disease, it was decided that they should be sent home before their two-year obligation was up. Blaine did recover fully in the United States, and they bought a small townhouse in Alexandria, VA. Blaine resumed university under Robert Franklin Gates, earning a Collegiate Professional Certificate and his Bachelor of Arts in 1963.

Family Life
After seven years of marriage without issue, Rayna and Blaine decided to adopt a son they named Kai, and within months, Rayna would become pregnant with their first daughter, Candelyn. The marriage, however, would not hold; they were soon separated and then divorced within a couple of years.

In 1967, Blaine married Anne Virginia Donnavan, daughter of State Senator John A. K. Donnavan and Mary Virginia Donnavan. Anne was studying painting under Pietro Lazzari at the Corcoran School of Art. Anne is known for her octopus paintings on oval canvases and wooden boards. John and Mary gave, as a wedding gift, their country log home on the Catoctin Creek in Taylorstown, Virginia, which they dubbed “Little Alps”. Anne and Blaine had three children; Peter (1969), Mora (1971), and Benjamin (1978). Blaine and Anne named their friend Jennie Lea Knight as Godmother to Mora.

Life at Little Alps, though primitive (wood heat and no running water), was not dull; the ramshackle construction, the international collection of artwork, objects d’art, kitsch, the permissive atmosphere, the stone cliffs with goats, Catoctin Creek, and the alluvial plain were conducive to creativity, drawing many painters, sculptors, and photographers from the area such as Ed Zerne, Jerry Lake, Jennie Lea Knight, Andrew Hudson, Teruo Hara, Frank DiPerna, [Mark L. Power], Carmen Barros Howell, Jacob Kainen, John P. Wise, Tommy Noonan, William Christenberry, H.I. Gates, Maggie Siner, and serving as an incubator for the artists, musicians, and artisans of the next generation, including The Furnace Mountain Band, David Tiller, Martin Fair, Tara Linhardt, Courtney Fair, Melissa Foster, David Staton, and Mora Larson da Silva. Anne eventually opened a framing shop in Taylorstown and began framing the work of her husband and others.

In 2007 the Larson’s bought a house at auction in Phenix, VA near their daughter. Initially, they split their time between Taylorstown and Phenix but gradually moved everything and stayed in Phenix. Larson was a voracious reader and maintained a library of several thousand books.

Educator
From 1961-1965, Larson taught art history, design, drawing, sculpture, English, writing, baroque and ancient art, watercolor painting, and other classes at Fairfax County Public Schools, Arlington Public Schools , Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia, Montgomery College, University of the Philippines, George Washington University, the University of Pittsburgh, Prince George’s Community College, and Hood College.

At the request of a number of his students, he established and operated an art school for two years at Dupont Circle which offered instruction in serigraphy (screen printing), drawing, woodcut, painting, sculpture, and color theory. Larson held a professorship at the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design from 1965-2000.

Through his years of teaching and mentoring, Larson has undoubtedly had an impact on many artists of subsequent generations, a few who acknowledge his influence are David Staton, Brad Anderson, and Chris Eichholtz.

Critic
After meeting in the mid-1960s Larson and Andrew Hudson began regularly critiquing each other's work, beginning in 1970. Over the next 5 decades, they came to rely on each other’s eyes to continuously improve and push their work in new directions.

Artist
Larson’s artistic output mostly consisted of drawing, sculpture, photography, and primarily painting. Larson’s style, technique, form, media, and use of materials evolved continually throughout his career. He was influenced early by Leger when at Mills College, “When Blaine Larson came to study art at Mills College in Oakland, California in the mid-fifties, French artist Fernand Leger's brief stay as an instructor there was long over. During the World War II years, many of the most advanced European artists – Mondrian, André Masson, Marc Chagall, Roberto Matta, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and Fernand Leger, worked, taught and exhibited in America, away from direct conflict. American artists were ripe for new creative excitement, and it all finally resulted in the first made-in-America art movements of modern times. Beginning with the freedom of abstract expressionism, American art tumbled into a rapid succession of Pop art, Op art, Minimalism (visual arts), Colour Field and other movements. No one found it surprising that Leger's after-presence lingered for some time in a far Western school. It was in this atmosphere that Blaine Larson gained knowledge and absorbed experience of the art of painting and sculpture.” Other influences on Larson were Hans Hofmann, Werner Tübke, and Jules Olitski, whose dictum “Keep the surface alive” guided his in-process evaluations of his own works.

In the late 1960s Larson was producing “odd organic images that somehow brought to mind caterpillars, tendrils, totems.” These were often painted on irregularly shaped canvases and wood cutouts. The culmination of this phase is arguably his piece entitled The Three Musicians which was selected for the Edmonton show.

In the 1970s his paintings re-examined “the half-antique conventions of postwar action painting. He tweaks and teases them, but does not pay them homage. Though he scribbles with his paint, splishing and dripping it, his paintings have within them no mood of sombre anguish. Instead, they display lyricism confounded by the whacky. His colours are electric, glaring, unexpected.” Generally, these paintings were on paper with a landscape orientation and mounted in pink frames. Larson discussing his use of paper says “My work on paper had something to do with getting “Pop”-ishness out of myself, and with wanting to do something shocking. I became dissatisfied with my sculptural direction in 1970. I had seen Andrew working on paper for some time and decided to try it. By accident, the paper I ordered was a bilious green. I decided to keep it and try working with it. This green paper actually helped me to get back into pure painting: it was awful, it wrinkled, and it ultimately created a tension that caused me to develop in new directions. I exorcised whatever was anti-art, anti-painting within me by painting in an uncomfortable situation. It was a fight that turned out to be very helpful. By using this green paper, I painted myself out of an aesthetic depression. Then I switched to white paper: I found a paper that was substantial, that didn’t wrinkle, that was fine, clean, something to relate to. I came to realise the differences between painting on paper and painting on canvas. I couldn’t have understood those differences without the initial work on paper. Now the advantages that I see with the canvas are numerous: I can stain into the raw canvas; I can draw on top of it; there’s more flexibility with the material, more plastic possibilities.”

In the 1980s Larson began using 3-foot and 2-foot square canvases canted 45° and dubbed the Diamond Paintings. He describes his approach in an interview with Clair List, which is included in Andrew Hudson’s Ongoing Dialogue: “I utilized a square format. Experimenting with the squares, I tried a diamond–it seemed a logical possibility. I put the first group on 3-foot square canvases together as diamonds and they became one shaped canvas. I arranged them in a series, horizontally. This wasn’t painting with the same spatial restriction that I had had on my previous work on paper - the paint could spread out along the edges of the diamond and make it seem bigger and relate it to the wall. The shape itself has funny things about it: behind it, there’s an implied rectangle much larger than the actual canvases…arranging the 2-foot canvases horizontally didn’t seem to work. I made a vertical group of two, which took on certain aspects of sculpture. The vertical scale reminded me of people, of African figurative sculpture of Pablo Picasso. As a format in itself, it seemed to have a lot of interest.” Andrew Hudson says of Larson’s work of this period in his notes for the 1988 Susan Conway Carroll Gallery Show “his diamonds are unlike any others. His bucolic botanical shapes–most recently spiraling curves, broad paisley contours, wild zigzags that frequently overlap and that sometimes change to resemble the branches of a tree–and his vibrant, explosive colors…push hard against the diamond’s edges, activate the painting to make it seem larger than it is. In between times, Blaine Larson has made some rectangular paintings on Japanese rice paper remarkable for overlapping color and texture as different papers are pasted together. Sometimes pieces of canvas from his paintings of twenty years ago appear like mysterious creatures inhabiting a world deep down at the bottom of the sea.”

From the 1990s, Larson’s art took a new turn after Hudson pointed out that a bronze on black diamond painting entitled Acropole, was an unexplored direction. Larson accepted the challenge and started using larger, rectangular canvases, usually hung vertically, and even larger unstretched canvases, “left nakedly on their own, bronze lines drawn on black…Blaine’s wizardry of line and contour…running full tilt, gaining speed and momentum from his vast knowledge botany, biology, and organic form.”

Larson explains the idea of working with Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy as an inspiration in a letter to his dealer Susan Conway: “The first hint of possible success came when I found a translation of the Inferno (Dante) by Mark Musa, professor of Italian at Indiana University. He has tried to give as much of the original feeling of the Italian as he could rather than turning the Inferno into English poetry. The result is that the visual character is much more obvious. By reading this version and the mythic background of the Greek characters in The Greek Myths of Robert Graves I am now getting a large fund of ideas which I can adapt to painting.”

Coinciding with the relocation to Phenix, Virginia, in 2007, Larson began painting (still with acrylics) on smaller (16”x20” and 11”x14”) pre-stretched canvases. With nearly a complete abandonment of line and an emphasis on topical vitality, the application of the paint was more suffuse, distributed, and amorphic, the elaborate organic shapes of his earlier works gave way to nebulae with only an occasional smattering of triangles and rectangles.

Exhibitions and Shows
October-November 1965 “Blaine Larson-Crowther” Jefferson Place Gallery

November 1965 “17th Area Exhibition” Corcoran Gallery with others

February-March 1967 “Blaine Larson-Crowther” Jefferson Place Gallery

November 1967 “18th Area Exhibition” Corcoran Gallery with Thomas Downing, Chun Chen, Willem De Looper, Sam Gilliam, Valerie Hollister

April-May 1968 “Blaine Larson” Jefferson Place Gallery

July-August 1968 “Jefferson Place Ten Years” Jefferson Place Gallery with William Calfee, Gene Davis, Willem de Looper, Thomas Downing, Robert Gates, Colin Greenly, Sam Gilliam, Helene Herzbrun, Valerie Hollister, Sheila Isham, Jacob Kainen, Rockne Krebs, Howard Mehring, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Kenneth Noland, V.V. Rankine, Paul Reed

September 1968 “Washington 1968: New Painting, Sculpture” 1969 Jefferson Place Gallery

March-June 1970 “Roy Slade and Blaine Larson” Jefferson Place Gallery

1970 “Ten Washington Artists” Edmonton Art Gallery with Rockne Krebs, Michael Clark, Sam Gilliam, Jennie Lea Knight, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring

January 1976 “The Washington Room: Corcoran School of Art Faculty Exhibition” Corcoran Gallery

1978 “Blaine Larson” Diane Brown Gallery

December January 1981 “On Going Dialogue” Corcoran Gallery with Andrew Hudson

December-January 1981-1982 “Washington Series Fifth Exhibition - Andrew Hudson and Blaine Larson” Corcoran Gallery

November 1988 “Blaine Larson” Susan Conway Carroll Gallery

November 1990 “Blaine Larson - New Paintings” Susan Conway Carroll Gallery

June 1995 “Color & Abstraction - Washington (1955-1975)” Corcoran Gallery

April 1996 “Open Studio” Andrew Hudson Studio

September 1996 “Corcoran Faculty Exhibition” Corcoran Gallery

1996 Blaine Larson American University

September 1998 “Corcoran Faculty Exhibition” Corcoran Gallery

September 1998 “Blaine Larson, Bronze on Black” Watkins Gallery American University

April 1998 “Blaine Larson” Andrew Hudson Studio Show

Public Installations
Painting “Step Up” 1970 American University

Painting “Satie” 1971 American University

Drawing “untitled abstraction” 1975 American University

Drawing “untitled abstraction” 1976 American University

Drawing “untitled abstraction” 1976 American University

Painting “Stanley and Oliver” 1982 American University