Kim Frohsin at the Crocker

Kim Frohsin and “Grasshopper Pie” at the Crocker Museum.

ON A RECENT VISIT to the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, artist Kim Frohsin rounded the corner to visit the work of old friends from the Bay Area Figurative movement and found her own “Grasshopper Pie” from the 1993. It was in good company, with an Elmer Bischoff landscape and a Manuel Neri sculpture nearby.

“Since the early 1950s, when the Bay Area artists David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and others began to return to representational motifs, California artist have pursued abstract depictions of the human figure,” the label noted. “Few have done so with the consistency of Kim Frohsin, who finds fresh inspiration in figures both nude and clothed, indoors and out. Flat and patterned, Frohsin’s figures often seem to become one with their environment, such as this woman at a bakery counter.”

Exhibition: “Vintage Kim Frohsin”

Neri, Bischoff and Frohsin at the Crocker Museum.

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My Minimalscapes

Kim Frohsin | Minimalscapes (1991)

FIRST PERSON | KIM FROHSIN

These four paintings on panel were created in succession during 1991, “my year of the ruler” — as in using the literal measuring tool to make marks or hold a brush load of paint against. That was my 30th year, near the beginning of my three-decade career in fine art.

I was then — as I have been in the decades since — exploring new subjects and new ways of making work. My exploration was informed by direct, concrete, personal life experience, and also by intuition, imagination and risk-taking.

These particular small works were borne during many months of making paintings on paper and panel that were as close to pure abstraction as I have ever come. In 1991, while walking in the hot Scottsdale, Arizona, sunshine, I made a simple linear drawing of a white tent. Then, back in San Francisco, this minimal drawing was the spark for a flood of work, over many months, which had as its core subject a house or tent shape. Numerous “architectonic” paintings evolved.

These four “scapes” were directly influenced by a 30th birthday gift from my grandmother: a trip to Turkey. These paintings in a muted palette, completed post-trip, stem from memories of our travels and things arid, ancient and beige.

The elements of earth, sky and water appear in these four, along with a sense of vastness and timelessness. They each are anchored by fictional objects and shapes: a floating mound as black mass, a berm of land with a steep linear road, a castle-like silhouette and wall, a banner shape like an enormous volleyball net. They seem expansive in their small-scale format. Yet they are condensed and quiet — an internal distillation of that lovely gift of travel to an ancient place.

Like all of my work, this group of four paintings are autobiographical. Until now, I’ve held on to them like entries into my private diary. In 2017, I finally decided to take them out of my youthful handmade frames and have them professionally framed. This year I am finally ready for them, for the first time, to go out into the world.

Thanatopsis — Aeterna

AETERNA VOLK IS DEAD. She did not pass! She did not fall asleep! She did not go to the great beyond! Aeterna Volk just died. She was never afraid of death, for if you are afraid of dying, you cannot love to live.

Aeterna Volk does not need a memorial or funeral service to convince herself that she truly is dead. The people who have known and loved her will memorialize her in their hearts. Those who never understood her philosophies will not be moved because she has expired.

— Final entry in a book of poems left behind by Carol Aeterna Volk

Russian River, 3 p.m.

Mary Robertson | Three Canoes

THIS IS, OF COURSE, the Russian River the casual tourist never sees. He’s in the middle of the damn painting, for one thing. For another, he’s got his eyes closed, soaking up the pure, unreflected heat. He’s too preoccupied, meditating, suspended weightless between water and sky. If he wasn’t on his day off, he’d probably notice the atmosphere is positively luminescent. Pass the Stroh’s, willya?

This is the world as seen by Mary Robertson. “For me, it’s always three in the afternoon, summer,” says Robertson. “No evenings, no mornings.”

Working from photographs, she paints the vacationers and their accoutrements as they float past her vantage point. “It seems to me as though the same swimmers, the same summer people, are always there,” says Robertson, who works with oil on linen and Masonite, not trying to capture the glow of the smogless afternoons but capturing it just the same. This is no small achievement; her work has been compared to Winslow Homer’s, Edward Hopper’s and especially, in its understanding of light, water and timeless human presence, to the Charles River paintings of Thomas Eakins.

“After my first show, somebody pointed that out to me, so I studied him,” says the artist. “It was a little embarrassing, really, for I hadn’t made the connection. To tell you the truth, I just paint what I see.”

The river itself is changing. “Last year,” she says, “They started releasing water upstream. The water is getting clearer. It’s also getting harder to paint. You can see the bottom — it’s like painting gin instead of pea soup. I’m afraid that what Gordon Cook [the painter] said about me is true — that I have a marvelous feel for algae.”

— MELVIN MARCUS

When Marion got married — almost

From remarks by Thomas Reynolds at a memorial on April 30, 2017.

Marion Seawell (1928-2017)

I CAME TO KNOW Marion Seawell 25 years ago when I opened a gallery in San Francisco. One of the first people I met was her great friend — and later mine — the art historian William Whitney, who lived two blocks away.

In 2008, with Marion sometimes kicking and screaming, we published a book of her work, This Has Certainly Been a Lot of Fun — a truly remarkable and brutally honest statement by an artist. To celebrate its publication, we had a small exhibition of her paintings at my gallery, and she gave a talk.

We kept in touch as she was finding a mostly happy home for her final years at the Redwoods in Mill Valley. Sometimes she would call on Friday afternoons and laugh about the horns honking in the background. Her fellow seniors were holding their weekly antiwar protest outside. It was clear she had found the right home.

Artists and influences

BAY AREA ARTISTS Kim Frohsin and Sandy Ostrau discuss the Matisse/Diebenkorn exhibition, the Bay Area Figurative Movement and other influences on their work, in conversation with the Smithsonian Institution’s Paul Karlstrom.

She was a lot of fun

Marion Seawell | President Taft Touring Walla Walla in Grandfather’s Car (1994)

By THOMAS R. REYNOLDS

With her right hand she painted as Marion Seawell. With her left hand she wrote as M.C. Wells. In both her right-handed paintings and her left-handed writings, she spent a lifetime exploring the quirks and contradictions of her dual personalities.

That lifetime came to an end on April 7, 2017, when Marion Seawell died at age 88 in Mill Valley, California, after a fall and a short hospitalization.

She led an interesting life, as she acknowledged in the dedication of a monograph of her work, published in 2008 on her 80th birthday: “To all the dear friends, young and old, past and present, who have helped make my journey through life such an interesting adventure.” The book was titled This Has Certainly Been a Lot of Fun.

In the book, as in her life and art, she told a rigorously honest personal story.