A California native, Leonard Edmondson, painter, printmaker, educator, and author, was born in Sacramento in 1916. His college studies began at the Los Angeles City College and continued at the University of California at Berkeley where he graduated in 1942 after earning his B.A. and M.A. in Fine Art. Between 1942 and 1946, Edmondson served in the U.S. Army in Military Intelligence. During these years, he traveled through Europe where he saw a body of work by Paul Klee. Immediately after the war, he explored the collections of the Louvre. Returning to California in 1947, he accepted the first teaching position of his distinguished career at the Pasadena City College. Concurrent with beginning teaching, Edmondson became absorbed with Klee and Kandinsky, studying Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook and Kandinsky’s theoretical writings. The year 1951 was pivotal for Edmondson as he made his first etching during a course taught by Ernest Freed and his first solo exhibition was held at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles. The following year his first solo museum show was mounted at the de Young Museum. Edmondson’s career included professorships at the Otis Art Institute, University of California at Berkeley, Pratt Institute, and the California State University in Los Angeles where he remained until his retirement in 1986… Click below to read more.

Born in the charming Danish countryside, Henrik Simonsen is a contemporary artist with a unique style. His brilliant colors imbue the viewer with a surreal vision of his subject. His work is inspired by traditional Scandinavian art and design, echoing nature with its bold shapes and vivid colors. Simonsen prides himself on always hand-drawing elements and believes this to be central to the beauty of the work he produces. Slowly building up layers of pigment, he creates depth, and through it, the feeling that each work is a living, breathing phenomenon.

“For me personally, the draw of the subject is the richness of nature as a metaphor for the strength and frailty, the passions and weaknesses inherent in the human experience.”

– Henrik Simonsen

John Ferren was an American painter whose abstractions were influenced by both Vassily Kandinsky and Zen Buddhism. Ferren’s Paintings are composed of floating forms within backdrops of solid color and allude to architecture, still life, and landscape while remaining vague. “I placed my hand on a tree trunk and instantaneously felt that every element of the landscape was alive—the light, air, ground, and trees,” he once wrote. “All were interrelated, living the same life, and (this is important in my art) their forms were all interchangeable.”

Fritz Rauh was born in Wuppertal, Germany. He began his art studies at the Braunschweig Art School in 1938. His artistic career was interrupted by World War II, when he was drafted and served on the Russian front. He was eventually captured and spent six years in a Russian prison camp. After his release, he returned to Braunschweig and immediately resumed his painting studies. He also met his future wife Alix, who emigrated to the United States, with Fritz following in 1954.  They settled in Marin County. Throughout his career, Rauh was influenced by the color theory of Johann Goethe and the music of J. S. Bach.

Findlay Galleries has been the exclusive representative of the Rauh estate since 2017.

Noah Landfield utilizes impressionistic overlays of metropolitan architectural renderings inspired by his visits to Japan and his reaction to the compact urban environment of Tokyo and other major metropolitan cities. Landfield’s paintings are redolent of the tension between man-made urban structures and the forces of nature and are also expressive of how they manage to coexist. His work holds a strong contemporary edge, as does his play with visual perception in the near-photographic quality of the cities he depicts, painted in a masterfully detailed manner.

Robert Richenburg was an abstract expressionist artist based in New York City, whose paintings were widely acclaimed in the 1950s and 1960s. While a student of Hans Hofmann, Richenburg exhibited at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim) in 1950. The following year, he participated in the historic Ninth Street Art Exhibition, and subsequently taught at Pratt Institute along with Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb, Jack Tworkov, Philip Guston, Milton Resnick and Tony Smith. By 1961, critic Irving Sandler declared that “Richenburg emerges as one of the most forceful painters on the New York Art Scene.” The Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others, purchased his work… Click below to read more.

Jack Wright grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended Williams College and St. Paul School of Art, studying with Cameron Booth. Wright then moved to Chicago and attended the Institute of Design. He married Patty Wright and moved to California in 1950, where he worked as an architectural color consultant for a number of years. In 1957, Wright moved to Morelia, Mexico, to continue his art practice. He returned to California in 1959 and built his house and studio in Inverness, where he lived and worked until his death… Click below to read more.