 My name is Barbara Verstein. I'm a member of the Santa Cruz County Arts Commission from the first district, Live Oak, and I'd like to welcome you all to our annual Artist of the Year presentation tonight, to honor Douglas McClown. I'd like to say that I think you probably all know and may have heard Robely Levy's remarks earlier this evening about why artists are so important to our community. And I know you share with me the spirit that our artists here in this community really truly enrich and enliven our lives in so many different ways. And as you go through the county now and you begin to visit our parks throughout the area, you'll begin to see our Art and Public Places program that is bringing our visual art into our parks, which I hope you will all begin to visit the parks and see what we're doing there. I'd like to take this opportunity also to introduce our previous artists of the year who we're very proud of. And I'd like to ask you to stand as I call on you please so that we can welcome you all properly. George Barati, Chuck Hilger, the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County, which is represented by Executive Director Lance Linares and President Jess Brown, the Cabrera Music Festival. Ellen Primack is here on their behalf. Ellen would just like, and I'd also like to mention a few others who I'm not sure I see in the room, but I'd like to call your attention to Lou Harrison, who has also been an artist of the year, and Jim Houston who we had hoped would both be able to attend tonight. And of course there are many others. We've been doing this now for nine years as it was. We're all very proud of our artists who I don't know whether or not you're all aware of the criteria for artist of the year, but what our commission tries to do is recognize an outstanding artist every year who is not only a resident of our county, but also whose work has gained a national reputation and takes the name of Santa Cruz and also brings this individual to other people around our nation for the enjoyment of everyone throughout the country. And it also, the other third and very important criteria for our artist of the year is that they've made a contribution to Santa Cruz County and to our local community. And you'll be hearing more about how Douglas McClellan has been able to do that here in Santa Cruz and we're very proud to recognize him this year. I'd like to now ask Sally Johnson if she would come forward from Sam Farr's office to make a presentation. Sally, you here? There you are. And where's Doug? He is right here. There you are. You need Doug. Let's first off give you this. Yeah. When Sam Farr wasn't able to be here at this moment because he had some other obligations, but he did tour your exhibit earlier today and he deemed it brilliant. In every term. And he asked me to do some research to create some things for the resolution and there were a few things that didn't fit on the page so I thought I'd read them. A friend and co-worker who's known Doug for some time and who has chosen to remain nameless has characterized his friend as a model of sanity and intelligence and good thinking. However, he said, I can only think of two lapses. The fiat he bought in Claremont. And the first time he visited Rome instead of wandering through the antiquities, instead he ended up in Mussolini's city. Otherwise he's sane and reliable. As we look at your exhibition, we're pleased to have you represent our county as artists of the year. Congratulations. Thank you. Doug, you can't get away that quickly. Please. I'd now like to ask Marilyn Hansen to join us. There you are, Marilyn. On behalf of Senator Henry Mello. Well, I get to fill in the rest of the pieces of his wonderful life here on behalf of Senator Mello. Whereas Douglas McClellan has been selected by the Santa Cruz County Arts Commission as a 1992 artist of the year as a tribute to the valuable contributions that he's made to the art world and for the great pride and distinction he has brought to the local community. And whereas a visual artist who has exhibited widely in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad, Douglas McClellan obtained experience at Chaffee College in Ontario and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and at Scripps College and the Claremont Graduate School in Claremont. And whereas he moved to Santa Cruz in 1971 to become a member of the art faculty at the University of California Santa Cruz and taught classes in drawing, painting, assemblage and visual fundamentals, he served as department chair from 1971 to 1974 and again in 1983. And whereas through his works he has contributed to the enrichment of the arts community in Santa Cruz County by inspiring and encouraging young artists during a long academic career. Whereas in the early 1970s he was involved locally with the Museum Without Walls which produced the revolutionary broadsides a collaborative effort of poets and visual artists. And whereas he was one of the five artists nationally to work on a Ford Foundation pilot study to develop a course for community group study of modern art. And he has served as a board member and active participant in several subcommittees of the Cultural Council and has been a member of several subcomm... of the Director's Advisory Committee of the Art Museum of Santa Cruz County. And whereas Douglas McClellan works at the edges of tradition in painting, collage, monoprint and book arts. I wonder what that means. What's the edges? We'll talk about it. Whereas the contributions that Douglas McClellan has made to people throughout Santa Cruz County, the state of California and the nation have been invaluable. And he has made a lasting impression on those individuals who have experienced his works. Now therefore be it resolved by the Senate Rules Committee that Douglas McClellan be congratulated for being selected as 1992 artist of the year by the Santa Cruz County Arts Commission commended for the significant contributions that he has made to the art world and for the great pride and distinction that he has brought to Santa Cruz County and extended best wishes for continued success in the future. This is the Senate Rules Committee Resolution signed by David Roberty Chairman and Senator Henry J. Melo. Thank you very much. You've just been saved by autobiography. Of course I'm very biased. I think we're saving one of the best pieces to last which is the recognition of our own county of UDUG. So I'd like to ask the chairman of our Board of Supervisors, Jan Butz, to please join us. Congratulations. Our resolutions are smaller so only one person has to hold them. So I'll give it to you. I'd like to really thank all of you for coming tonight. I was thinking as I was sitting up here that I've never seen this room so full of happy people. I mean, usually when the room is full it's about something very controversial. Maybe some people are happy and some are sad, at least by the end some are happy and some are sad. But it's really, I think, a tribute to Doug that all of you have come tonight to honor him on this very special night for him. I'd also like to, before talking about Doug for a minute, thank our Arts Commission because they are a very vocal and important part of our commission process here in the county and they really do a lot of work for us and we've got all kinds of new things going, like art in the parks and art in our public places and whatever, and I really appreciate the work certainly Barbara does for the first district and I know all the other supervisors do too and I just wanted to take a moment to say that. Art is certainly a very important part of life here in Santa Cruz and Doug has been so involved in so many things with Art Museum and Cultural Council and so many other public issues and I think that that is really important and I always notice, I came in today and I saw flowers here in the boardroom and I thought wow what a difference it makes. It's a small thing but it looks so much better than it usually does and it's the same with these walls if you've ever been here when the exhibits are down it's like 100% different than when the exhibits are here and all of the artists in Santa Cruz County just add so much and certainly to be named the artist of the year is the very selective amount of very select group of people and in just looking at your art exhibit it is so enjoyable and our offices are here on the fifth floor and the beautiful colors and certainly the differences of the mediums and reading the proclamation and then looking around it really is very clear that you've got such varied styles and I certainly enjoy the beautiful color but I'd just like to thank you personally because since our offices are up here we'll be able to enjoy your work while I'm while it hangs so congratulations and thank you all for coming Thank you Yes Well it's now my turn to segue over to you Doug so that you can give us your perspective on your career and how you view art and it's my pleasure to have had the opportunity to be here tonight I'm going to retreat back here I have my remote control I can control my environment and thank you all for your generosity my wife thinks you've done too much already and I want to take advantage of the generosity and encouragement that you've all given by subjecting you to a personal account of my life as an artist it's an autobiographical sketch that might turn out to be like the third grade book report this book tells a great deal more about dogs than I'm interested in knowing but it's just a few pages a couple of dozen slides 35-40 minutes tops to promise I was born in Southern California and if you want to know what that looked like then all you have to do is rent some old oral and hearty movies we had bungalows we had avenues we also had ice cream parlors that looked like ladies in hoop skirts we had orange juice stands appropriately shaped like an orange when I was in high school we bought our sandwiches from a place shaped like a weenie on a bun when I graduated from junior high school we had a yearbook we were in very progressive education time so we had a yearbook in junior high school it was a simple thing it had photographs of the school photographs of the faculty and of the students and underneath each of our pictures we rated a legacy things like devil with the women or close horse or Mr. Football mine was dirty fingernails and this is the absolute truth it's the only time I think it was ever used as a legacy in a yearbook all my remembered life I've drawn but not compulsively I was a rather sickly kid and I never learned to roller skate so I had a lot of time to read and a lot of time to draw and a lot of time to make up codes at 13 I sent away for a Billy Han cartoon by mail course and the first lesson of the first page of the first lesson said you must cover acres of paper with gallons of ink the sooner you make your first 1,000 mistakes the sooner you'll be over them and I immediately discontinued the course I got a D in my first art class which was in watercolour and I've never trusted the medium since I eventually went to art school against parental wishes so industrial design seemed a good solution it was a compromise between my innate desire to get my fingernails dirty and some deep need I had to be deep middle class need I had to conform luckily the Walt Disney Studios were on strike and one of the men from the studio had opened an art store across the street from school and he saw me as a rudderless young man who was woefully on the wrong path so he started to instruct me he became my pusher and he sold me on modern art he would give me illustrations books to read tell me about it tell me about a rotten thing industrial design was really he totally subverted me Pearl Harbor came we were eligible and we studied camouflage and so we finally went into the service fearless camouflage you name it we'll hide it eventually we went overseas and didn't do any camouflage and so while I was overseas not doing camouflage I started up the career ladder of command at some point I discovered the joys of insubordination I was reduced in rank for the good of the service busted and on the day it became official a package arrived from home I had sent for some oil paints an anthology of modern poetry and Sheldon Chaney's book on modern art and there they arrived that very day I became a free man as it were this great epiphany took place in the Philippines right there on the floor of the jungle the oil paints were great they allowed you to make mistakes unlike that devilish medium watercolor which demands a certain amount of dexterity being ambidextrous I didn't have the other kind of dexterity the wonderful world of abstract art was not obligated to the tedium of copying which is a really bad misapprehension I had what art what drawing was about and the modern poetry was great and I realized you didn't even have to use capital letters if you didn't want to so with this great package of freedom arriving I never looked back that was where I wanted to be and that's what I became for the next five years I'd gone to art school on the GI bill supplemented by making scale models for smoky to bear for the LA city schools don't burn smoky's habitat this was the motto over the models I made by the time I'd learned about by that time I'd learned about art to this extent drawing is important foil of course is a wonderful material it's a form of religion composition is the key to any puzzle but social message is also important one of my most influential teachers took me aside once and confided in me that I could be the person to paint the next George Washington crossing the Delaware I've puzzled over that for years I'd also collected my own pantheon of artists artistic mentors from art books and from museums and things I'd looked at I wisely married the woman who took role in school and conveniently I received an MFA degree now at some point some precise point near adulthood we'd become printed with certain precepts that try to stick through us through life we'd become grounded and my grounding was your basic modern conventional modern say grounding a little expressionism a little abstraction very sincere but slightly tasteful a neo-conservative rebel if you will and of course we all learned from reading about van Gogh that we're all going to be sadly misunderstood throughout our lives Cézanne had cast his long shadow on nearly everyone at the time and I was imbued with the standard urge to create form it's a near cosmic substance that no one really could get around to defining but it was there and even so I was suspicious of all that wild stuff coming out of New York in the early 50s but I was at the same time fascinated with the freedom that it represented on getting out of grad school in 1950 I had because accidents at the times a family me, Ozzie, you Harriet a job waiting a gallery affiliation in Los Angeles which was becoming an art place I was I had a fairly good track record as an exhibiting and sometimes prize winning painter the job as it turned out wound up being a teacher of five classes plus night class and in addition to that I was chairman of a growing department and so this twist of faith that managed to keep me chairmaning for the next 25 years I meant among other things that for nine months of the year I had to use the left side of my brain being terribly adult and then for three months I could try to use my right side and become an intuitive creature which wasn't always that easy to pull off and it led to a certain scatteredness of activity that still hangs around me I think any history made of my work my life as an artist would have to be a series of short stories and not a novel it's a series of discrete things that happen for a number of years I made an exhibited paintings and I had an affair of the heart with color and surface and it was wonderful okay so for those of you taking notes these are significant things to remember dirty fingernails mail order, cartooning, orange shaped orange juice stands, Walt Disney's labor policies insubortionation in the US males George Washington crossing the Delaware and Smokey the Bear of such stuff or dreams made after a while in the early 60s I began to have some slight ruptures of faith my undying commitment to painting develops and glitches form as I ported it it didn't seem to be an end all mastery of paint oil paint of course still had its kitchen pleasures but it didn't seem as cosmically central to the world as it had certain interests and curiosities I'd put on the back burner as not being serious art making began to insist on attention collage that terribly flexible non-linear art schoolish mildly illicit fun form of playing around with images began to appear much more legitimate and it was flexible and it had a lot of adventure to it and these were qualities I didn't find in good old drawing and painting I'd seen too many colleagues who were still plugging away making artifacts that they hoped looked like art not a kind of joyless activity and I thought that that was not a great fate to have so these alternate approaches allowed for an attitude of play and allowed for a collision of formal elements and subject matter that was quite zesty I'd used cut and paste in school found it useful but it was never for real never art and also for several years I'd been doing vacation stuff putting flotsam and jetsam together at a beach house we rented it was great stuff for the mantel for house gifts or stuff like that but it didn't have a capital A attached to it so it wasn't really art yet even though it went by a rather nifty name of assemblage I couldn't quite elevate it but it was totally absorbing and I found really very creative so this taste of openness along with some unscratched issues having to do with subject matter having to do with words actually poetry had been a thing I'd done rather seriously in the army for various reasons I didn't draw much not to mention some fascination with some really funky old technical things I'd learned doing smoky the bear little glues I'd discovered and the use of goat hair and things that nobody else did and there was so much fun to use but I couldn't find a legitimate avenue but I sensed that there was a way I could use these things so much for my grounding as a dedicated painter I'd started dropping ballast and trying to move into something else more easily but the generation that I sprang from to play I think maybe more than most after we were participants in the Great Depression World War II we were Ozzy and Harriet we were the spearheads of unparalleled progress lighted by GE to allow oneself to play was a denial of your very own grounding it was even God forbid an insult to the spirit of Vincent van Gogh who suffered for our sins and perhaps the best influences an artist can have are not the lifters the inspirational artists but the ones that give him permission to do something else and I had been interested in a lot of artists who were I'd say pretty informal artists artists that did junk sculpture artists that did collage and I would have considered them minor artists and then it occurred to me by very simple twist I could make them into major artists and therefore I had my permission so I went through a sea change and more or less that is where began to happen I think I'd like to go with some slides now and we are not we are not lighted yet some of these early slides are in terrible shape they are not level you are not losing your bearings this goes back to 53 is that in focus I can't really tell from here and it probably represents pretty much what I was doing when I was first out of school I was fascinated with color I was fascinated with playing with shapes playing with the basic building blocks of painting still life as an interest but a much greater interest in landscape and I had to sort of recapitulate the whole process of making a landscape it's like the dissertation on the roast pig I had to burn down the village to get a roast pig I'd start with a very literal landscape and then painstakingly hack it to pieces this is a painting of a quarry near our house so the sense of the ground dropping out from under you is what I was after there was smog in that area even at that time and you sense it in the painting but you can see I think a fascination with color in one of that time in a very amateur slide the the magnificent center of interest here is not a part of the painting someone in the mid 70s that got on the slide and I don't know what to say about but the need to get more concrete I think is what sets in here and also the need to to say something about things and this to me was a kind of watershed painting it was called the object to landscape and it came at the time when they were first working the rockets and there were there are pictures in the paper there are pictures on television of the large ganderies in the rockets and to me the analogy between that object and the medieval cathedral being the center of the community struck me as being very similar the object that soaks up all of the energy around it and I punished this painting and ruined it eight times and I don't think I ever saved it but it was important in that I got away from certain visual habits and into a much more tactile sort of paint and by this time then I'm using sand in the paint and light aggregates building the blocks a figure from from a Romanesque church and then a jump to even more of an object-oriented painting where parts of these shapes are cut out I think the date on this would probably be about 1962 just a quick run here but when I go to the beach I went to new paintings I would make things and here on our porch is a chair I made painted decorated not legitimate not art, nothing like that I did it or I'd find wood on the beach and we had a particularly rich beach a lot of stuff that had been on boats washed ashore tumbled in the sand and had an old washboard came ashore so making these tablets became really fascinating and the thing I found is that by taking something that already had a previous existence something that had lived and been batted around I could borrow that energy and work it into a whole new sort of life I carried it back inland and had the good fortune of spending having a studio for two years next door to a furniture maker who made a lot of mistakes can't beat it so I began to work in walnut you see as he got better I had to switch but every so often there was a a desire to get back to just push and paint and I've never lost it so I worked out a series of paintings on the tiger this is Blake's tiger updated and I even rewrote the poem I can't remember the first few lines tiger tiger burning mild oh to think you once were wild it's the organization tiger the owner of that painting might even be in this room now I don't know he is how's it holding up still inspiring you okay and because of my academic life committee of tigers I didn't really try to do anything other than just be slick and representational and use paint in as natural a way as I could I told you that the course of things is more like a series of stories rather than a novel it's not each discrete summer each discrete vacation from adulthood you might say might have produced a different thing the next things are a few of those episodes along the way I built a drawing machine I thought I needed some pattern and I didn't want to draw it myself I thought I can make a machine that will make nice patterns and I can use those in collage or I can use those in something else and I got a barbecue motor and I got some piano wire and some fish weights and some pens and I made this mobile that went around and I could trick it into jumping like a water bug and not repeat itself too much the one thing I miscalculated on was that it was so fascinating to watch I'd say okay I'm going to leave it and do something useful and in two minutes I'd be back watching the machine go through its traces it generated a bunch of drawings but it was it was a failure as a time saving device when we were in Rome what better thing to do than get some bronze casting done and something I could do in an apartment so I made some waxes and had them cast this is a series of plaques that I did there that were based on an item that I read about I've always been fascinated with the Etruscans they had great believers in the Horuspex, the person that reads the Theolmans, that reads the signs of the future and in order to train young Etruscans to be good liver readers they made up models of livers in bronze, a training liver so that the teacher could say okay when this happens there's going to be pestilence and when this happens you're going to have good crocs and so on but a great idea a training liver or a training anything made in bronze and so I made a series of training livers along the way I got a commission to do a stained glass window and I thought at one time I was going to put everything and become a stained glass artist I didn't do the honest work on it, I just did the design and cut the glass and let it this is for a library at Scripps College in Claremont and it's a it's a development of alphabet the alphabet idea going from the base which you cannot see here up to the Roman alphabet, triumphant above all how's that for chauvinism it was radical to the man that made it because we left some clear glass in it and he said that should never be done I did want views, it runs two stories in a mezzanine and it was important to be able to see outside I also have had a fascination with trying to get words and images together and for the life of me I can't figure out yet how to do it I did a series of haiku just being one and I decided to make a painting out of a haiku and I could never figure out what I was more loyal to the poem or the image and I wound up with things that I thought were rather cosmetic and not very interesting but I'm showing you here a sampler mostly of failures to show you that even though I'm modest the year I'm modest right to talk a little more about collage it's more than a technique it's an attitude and it's an approach that's really rather all consuming it's the jamming together of disparate images it can be the fluid filmic idea of montage it can be sampling in new music it can be the visual metaphor for the passage of time which a visual artist always seems to have a little bit of trouble with it can be a gate to unconscious processes because it is so flexible it is so fast it is so surprising and it's probably truer to the mosaic way we see things in the world than your distance painting of reality suitable for framing it does have a truth to it that other pictorial means do not have but I think most important it has that playful dimension it's free form it has something to do with magic and to me it turned out to be sort of like catnip now play demands an open attitude and it can be awfully trivial and there's nothing at stake and at some point there have to be limits when I stopped chairmaning I had more time more attention I could be reasonably silly for longer periods of time I started making collages out of some very tricky materials that I discovered I talked about grounding earlier on there's three things I learned engraved on my heart in art school symmetry is done bilateral symmetry is done does not composition illusionism is a cheap shot we must go for eternal verities and not illusionism and a tricky technique masks an empty soul so I suddenly found myself doing things that were doing things that were intensely symmetrical highly illusionistic and tricky beyond belief I'd forgotten how mysterious these are to people until I put some up at the art league and then show you a little while back and people were really fascinated with how they were done I sort of lost sight of it I'm not going to tell you how they were done but I think they were fascinated I could do the mountains behind behind the Mona Lisa you know I could do that I just gorge myself on all those forbidden goodies that I had never been I've never allowed myself to approach before this one is titled Four Absent Angels and this is Voice for Madness and this one I realized long after I did it is very influenced by the Jasper Johns painting the target with the four items in the boxes above and I stood over Lance's desk for a while space comics where I'd been doing things that flirted with the same idea of the idea that was common to comic strips and I thought oh what the hell let's do a comic strip so I put balloons in and did the whole the whole number now this probably this isn't collage in the strictest sense because in collage in the strictest sense you take something that has a previous existence like a playbill or a piece of newspaper or a ticket or a tear of a photograph these are all papers that I made from scratch so it's only collage in that these things are pasted together the de-coupage aspect of collage is what really happens here but this idea of limits I would make rules in order to not pass over into something that was too trivial in some of the collages I used a deck of cards to determine what happened when in some of the later works I decided that I would limit myself to five objects in the cage you'll see some out in the in the case at some point I allowed myself to cheat but until I could get past the sensor that sat on my shoulder and we all have a sensor on our shoulder that tells us things we'd rather not hear and it can inhibit you tremendously so it keeps you from getting down to cases and if you can convince the sensor on your shoulder mind's mail him convince him to go along with the rules as you're making them up you can get into the middle of things and then you can begin to press around and really get something done so I made rules I didn't miss it a bit my time became my own and I was able to concentrate I think the only downside is that I had fewer outside factors to blame for not working and of course then when I retired I had even fewer things to blame and I can now play it working to my heart's content even when I don't feel like it as a carryover from this art as a summer activity I worked basically in series from five to maybe 30 pieces and I find that by working a series of things more or less at the same time you get a dialogue going between pieces the poet Tony Conner said the recipe for writing a good poem was invent a jungle then explore it and I think that describes it pretty well with several works going at the same time you have a lot of paths to explore it that you can explore an idea fully so in sitting down to do something this began a series of works with rubber stamps and prints and I must honestly admit watercolor I started collecting rubber stamps and having them made and have an unholy collection of them now which you will see the images of on the piece out in the hall and sporting around town on various buses but combining them with airbrush, watercolor, colored pencil whatever to create these kind of Persian miniature things of absurdities and rubber stamp is very much like collage because instead of cutting and pasting you really stamp something there and you stamp it there and you mask it out and you stamp it there this is one of the explorations of the world it's a perfect and the Xerox is a friend indeed too here's a one of a kind piece that is in a local collection with Xerox's of a Karate or Taichi postures and another attempt at words and here are the rubber stamp images with the book this very precious book of which there are only 11 copies a book of specious advice done on the best of paper using the most difficult techniques hand colored hand fold, hand bound and everything from a gaseo windbag called Uncle Bob and it was primarily in the writing here that the thing became important for the exhibition here the works are done fairly recently and they represent polar opposites I think they're done within two years of each other and the Xerox which we can see from here and they're in the halls they really represent this return to the joys of painting even though they are done as monotype collages the issues are those of painting I would start with a piece of good paper and print on it and then we print various patterns on oriental paper that's very easy to glue down and begin to just play with shapes and it was a very lifting thing to do it was a very light, very enjoyable thing to do the cages are almost anorexic in comparison I limited myself to five objects in a little cage right? I think of the implications of that very little color the cages black, they are trapped in there or virtually trapped in there and they're either stage sets for the mine or shamanistic rituals or whatever they might be they came after the earthquake and I don't know what the earthquake had to do with really I'm not sure that it had a great deal to do with it but in one of those terrible periods where nothing was no ideas were coming and suddenly there they were and I worked them up and then suddenly they stopped meeting there's no more need for them so here I think I just left out a very significant part of my life I'm sorry throwback quickly at another point in my life when I couldn't figure out what to do I suddenly decided I would make set pieces and this was one of the first threshes at it the frame is actually the top of a singer sewing machine cabinet you know the old kind of machine would lift up and set into this and I was casting around for something that wouldn't work and then it occurred to me that if I made 18 boxes with peak roofs on them and said okay wise guy what are you going to do that something would have to happen because I'm too scotch to make all this stuff and then not use it it was a lot of trouble so I did a whole series of house forms that are about three and a half inches deep there's a glass front this one happens to be a farewell to LA the jigsaw is a map of the LA freeway and the it's hard to read here but this is a rear view mirror where the y'all and a great idea the ideas began to come out of the material by this point I really trusted the material that I didn't really want to impose ideas on it for the most part I thought okay I'll start and it's going to tell me something I wanted to exercise the ghost of salt so I got a version of Cezanne and then I faked it up as a painting I got some stuff from the craft store that they put on reproductions that looked like paint strokes I took a frame and still