WALTER GABRIELSON (1935–2008)
Walter Gabrielson, an artist, teacher, and writer who interpreted human behavior in paintings has died, reports Suzanne Muchnic in the Los Angeles Times. “Art is my contribution and my experience with life. It just can’t get much more intricate or more intense or more textural than that,” Gabrielson wrote in his autobiography, Persistence, self-published in 1993. His works are in many public and private collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s. But he was perpetually out of step with art trends and chafed against a system that had little room for narrative art, writes Muchnic. In “Why Suck the Mainstream if You Don’t Live in New York?,” an essay published in Art in America in 1974, Gabrielson asked: “In this land of immense beauty and diversity, filled with characters, operators, canny inventors, and dull middle classes, seething with incredibly complex human and resource pressures, spawning artists in tonnage figures, why, why should what is authenticated everywhere as art have all the excitement of coal production figures in Pravda or the art page of the good grey New York Times?” “Timing is everything in the art world,” said artist and critic Peter Plagens. “If Walter had emerged later, he would have gotten some traction. But his heyday was in the 1970s, when everyone was either doing late Minimalism or digging ditches or painting big abstract paintings.” Hired by San Fernando Valley State College, now Cal State, Northridge, in 1966 to start a lithography department, Gabrielson taught art there until 1981. He lived in Pasadena throughout his teaching years, sharing a studio with Plagens for much of the time. Added Plagens, “Walter was the best draftsman I ever encountered. The guy was really good. When he boiled down social truths into paintings, they were always so well designed.”
