The Accidental Collector: Art, Fossils, and Friendships

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University of Washington Press, 2014 - Art - 336 pages

Readers who fell in love with The Eighth Lively Art will delight in the stories and profiles that the painter and paleontologist Wesley Wehr has collected in this follow-up to his earlier memoir of Pacific Northwest artistic and intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s. Above all, these are Wehr's accounts, distilled by passionate recollection, of what some remarkable artists and thinkers brought out in him and in each other--stories of creative people and how they inspired, influenced, challenged, and occasionally infuriated one another.

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Page 221 - ... National Park Service in the latter's project for the Independence Hall area has made possible important opportunities for research in the restoration and preservation of historic American buildings. The proximity of Philadelphia to New York, Baltimore and Washington places such collections as those of the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick Collection, the Walters collection and the National Gallery of Art within easy reach of the student, who is able to supplement his research...
Page 234 - The Pit and the Pendulum," and "The Fall of the House of Usher...
Page 106 - Greenwood," and was one of the first women in the United States to become a...
Page 237 - ... Montross] invited me to go up to his gallery and visit him and said he had a picture there he would like me to see ... It was a picture that so affected me that I in all truth was never the same after the first moment — for the power that was in it shook the rafters of my being . . . This picture was a marine by Albert P. Ryder — just some sea, some clouds, and a sail boat on the tossing waters. I knew little or nothing about Albert Ryder then, and when I learned he was from New England the...
Page 312 - Several days before I left Seattle in 1978 to return to Basel, I went to the Seattle Public Market. I went to the upper level of Manning's coffee shop and sat at a window table watching the sea gulls swooping through the sky, the ferry boats coming and going from the terminal below, and the distant Olympic Mountains to the west.
Page 161 - ... cards. The people at his table would fall silent and stare at these small, beautiful pictures, far off into space and coolness: the coldness of the Pacific Northwest coast in the winter, its different coldness in the summer. So much space, so much air, such distances and lonelinesses on those...
Page 218 - I view boogie-woogie as homogeneous with my intention in painting — a destruction of melody equivalent to the destruction of natural appearances, and construction by means of a continual confrontation of pure means — dynamic rhythms.
Page 56 - Wind (c. 19505), is a composition of large expressionistic sweeps of color with a halo of gray shadows. The brushwork parallels the calligraphic strokes of Northwest School painters like Tobey and Guy Anderson.

About the author (2014)

Wesley Wehr, painter and composer, is affiliate curator of paleobotany at the Burke Museum of Natural History, University of Washington. He is the author of The Eighth Lively Art: Conversations with Painters, Poets, Musicians, and the Wicked Witch of the West.

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