User:Songcat/Barbara Hall Fiske

'''Barbara Hall Fiske (B. Hall) ... B. Hall, (Isabelle Daniel Hall Fiske Calhoun), b. 1919 in Tucson, Arizona, is an American Artist and Cartoonist. She was born into an old Southern family which had moved to Arizona to try to overcome tuberculosis in its ranks. Isabelle (Barbara's) uncle, A.V. Jones, was dying of TB, so his sister, Isabella Daniel Jones, one of the "beautiful Jones sisters of Asheville, North Carolina"-- an early model after her family's slaves were lost to the Civil War-- took him to Tucson to try to save his life. After many tribulations, including A. V.'s death in 1915, "Belle" Hall married John Hall, Jr., a collateral descendant of Signer of the Declaration of Independence Lyman Hall, governor of Georgia. He was the editor of the local Tucson paper at the time, but after the marriage soon moved to Phoenix, AZ to work on a different paper there. In the meantime, Isabelle Jones Hall, now the Clerk of the Pima County Court, gave birth to Isabelle Daniel Hall (Babs, or Barbara) on Sept. 9, 1919. Six months later, John Hall died of the Spanish Influenza in Phoenix, and was buried in Tucson. Barbara was raised by her mother, her aunt May (Polly) Caldwell (the other "beautiful Jones sister," mother of her cousins Isabella and Archibald Caldwell. When grown "Babs" attended art school in Los Angeles and then went to New York City to study at the Art Students' League. However, she felt denigrated by this institution, and instead, getting an apartment in the West Village, became a painter and a cartoonist for Harvey Comics under the name of B. Hall. She drew "Girl Commandoes" and may also have drawn "The Black Cat." She moved to New York in 1940. In 1943 she met Irving Fiske, freelance writer, playwright, and WPA writer, who was known in the village as "God" because of his ability to tell stories and weave personalities together into a greater sense of unity. Though Barbara and Irving, who fell in love around this time, could not have been more different from the abstract painters of the period such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, de Kooning is said to have joined Irving and Barbara's table at the Waldorf Cafeteria in order to hear the conversation taking place. Barbara painted figurative imagery, landscapes and portraits, as well as religious imagery-- the exact opposite of the abstract impressionists. On January 8, 1946 Barbara married Irving Fiske at City Hall, New York, in a ceremony attended by her mother and the religious painter Joachim Probst. Soon after, she and Irving Fiske bought 140 acres of land in central Vermont to become an artist and writers' retreat, called Quarry Hill Creative Center. They had a daughter, Isabella Joachim Fiske, on August 12, 1950, and a son, William John Fiske, on February 4, 1954 (he passed away on July 18, 2008). Barbara Hall Fiske, who gave up her cartooning for full-time painting in tempera and pastel, still lives in Vermont and is a grandmother and great-grandmother. She continues, at the age of 92, to advise young artists on their work.