User:Shirin Stave-Matias/sandbox

■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■--> George Stave, 88, artist, born July 29, 1923, in Los Angeles California and died on August 26, 2011, in Cranbury, New Jersey. He was the oldest of three sons of Wilma (neé Moore) and George Arne Stave, a Norwegian immigrant. After growing up in Salinas, California, he returned to Los Angeles at the age of 17 as a scholarship student at the Chouinard Art Institute. In his early 20s he worked as a set painter in the art department of Paramount Studios and as a painting instructor at the Jepson Art Institute. He moved to Paris in 1949 and studied painting at the Académie Julian. In 1951 he was awarded a Fulbright Act grant for a year’s study in India, and thereafter traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia and Japan, studying and collecting art. Returning to New York in the mid-1950s, he was briefly a student of the abstract expressionist painter Robert Motherwell at Hunter College, and took classes at the Art Students League. He turned away from avant-garde movements in his own art, preferring representational painting, which was his lifelong passion. He exhibited his impressionistic portraits, interiors, and especially closely observed landscapes and still lifes in galleries and museums in California, New Jersey, and New York. A member of United Scenic Artists union, he worked for most of his career as a set painter for NBC Studios and, later, Lincoln Scenic Studios, in New York. In 1956 he married Mahbubeh Mahboubian, an Iranian student at the Manhattan School of Music, who survives him, along with three daughters, Pari Stave of New York, Shirin Stave-Matias of Tomar, Portugal, and Kian Stave of New York; a son-in-law, Fausto Matias; and three grandchildren, George Kusserow, and Soraya and Dario Matias.