I
got my first exposure to painting when visiting my grandparents in the
Adirondack Mountains in Elizabethtown, N.Y. They lived next door to a painting
school known as “The Old Mill School.” The artists who taught there were
primarily landscape and portrait painters who taught oil painting.
My mother and her siblings as well as my grandparents had their portraits
painted there. At 60 my grandmother took up painting. I knew that I would be
an artist by the time I was eight .
My grandmother got me going on landscape painting and as I got older I took
classes at the Montclair Museum in Montclair, New Jersey. After
graduating high school I went to Goddard College in Plainfield, VT and took a
study term in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I took classes at the Boston Museum
School.
I met artists Phil Geraci and Joey de Martelly who were my early influences,
teaching me design and sculpture. In 1970 I transferred to California College
of Arts and Crafts, in Oakland, CA (now known as California College of Art), and
received my Bachelors of Fine Art in 1973. In 1976 I worked at Dharma Press, a
Buddhist Publishing House in Emeryville, CA, where I was a paste-up artist and
did the renderings for 90 manifestations of the Buddha. 1976 was also the year
that I started working on my original existential illustrated children’s book,
(which has finally been printed in 2008), “The Pet.”
In 1979 I took a class called “Form and Language,” that was co-taught by the
late sculptor, Dennis Leon and by the poet, Steve Ajay. I enrolled in graduate
school as a Sculpture major in 1980, and received my Master of Fine Arts, cum
Laude in 1982. Both Dennis Leon and Steve Ajay
became my mentors while a grad student. I am forever indebted to their insight,
kindness and generosity.
After graduating I continued to make sculpture for a few years but found that
the large scale sculpture I was making was difficult to store after I moved from
my large studio in Oakland to a much smaller one in Marin County in 1984. I
moved into working primarily as a two-dimensional artist working in pastel,
watercolor, printmaking, acrylics and oils. Most of
the work for the past 15 years has been in
oil paintings and I continue to use Nature, and Landscape as inspiration for my
fine art contemporary oil paintings.
Contemporary Art; featuring abstract nature and landscape paintings using water,
trees, sky and land as jumping off points, by California contemporary artist,
June Yokell. Original Fine Art includes large scale landscape oil paintings,
medium sized work and giclee prints. These contemporary fine art oil paintings
and giclees whose subject matter derives from
Nature, and the original limited edition of June’s fine art book “The Pet”,
a book 30 years in the making with 17 ink drawings and original text are
available for purchase directly from the artist, June Yokell.
I now have a
Blog
which I update regularly. The content of the blog is ultimately about anything
that I've been thinking about that inter weaves and influences my work and my
process. My hope is to invite artists and art lovers into a dialogue of
perception that is the ping and pong of the personal and the public.
