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.
