George Demont Otis, Painter

Otis has long been considered one of America’s premiere Impressionists and one of California’s leading proponents of landscape painting. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, orphaned at the age of six and sent to Chicago, Otis’ artistic training started at age fifteen at the Chicago Art Institute. Later, Otis studied and painted with such well known artists as Robert Henri, John Sloan, Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, William Merritt Chase, John F. Carlson, Wellington Reynolds, and John Vanderpoel. In 1919, Otis brought his education, talent, love of nature, and teaching to Southern California where he worked until 1930. Later that year, he relocated to San Francisco. Between that time and his death in 1962, Otis continued to travel and paint extensively throughout California and the West. As a skilled painter, etcher, lithographer, stage designer, wood carver, restorer, author, poet, philosopher, and teacher, Otis influenced countless artists who were his companions and students.

George Demont Otis was an American artist, whose inspiration rose from the native tradition of American landscape painting. He is listed in Who’s Who in American Art.

He was born in Tennessee in 1879, orphaned six years later, and was sent to live with his grandmother in Chicago. He showed early promise of his future talent by rendering meticulous architectural drawings of metropolitan structures in Chicago. His fine arts education was first made possible by a teacher so excited by his obvious interest and talent that she brought him to the attention of a United States Senator. When Otis was fifteen years old, the Senator presented him with a full scholarship to the Chicago Art Institute. Not many years later, Otis would return to this school as an instructor.

His art education continued at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts under John Vanderpoel. The east coast art scene drew him to New York where he studied at the Cooper Union, the National Academy of Design, Art Students League, Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts, and Woodstock School of Painting. A man of tremendous energy and stamina, he took private lessons with many prestigious teachers of the American art world. He studied under John F. Carlson for landscape, Izra Winters and Wellington J. Reynolds for figures, Robert Henri for still life, and William Merritt Chase.

Otis helped pay for his education by playing professional baseball for three seasons.

He was an accomplished pitcher, playing at different times for two teams in the Southern Association. He was the first in the league to use an outcurve pitch. He generated hundreds of grease pencil drawings of the south during those years. His command of the grease pencil and gouache were evident in numerous wash drawings, pen and ink illustrations, watercolors, and pastels. Otis was a master of black and white as well as color.

He was a virile, robust man. He often journeyed to the backcountry wilderness to paint. At his studio near Estes Park, Colorado, he painted and hiked with early leaders of the National Parks movement, sharing his sense of the human need for untamed nature. While teaching at the Chicago Art Institute, he spent the summers painting and backpacking through mountains, canyons and deserts of many states. Bryce and Zion Canyons in Utah, and the great expanses of the Arizona-New Mexico desert found expression on his canvases. He lived with and painted the Native Americans of the southwest desert, and studied the customs, arts, and religions of the Hopi, Navajo, Yuma, Isleta, Acoma, Taos, and Pima tribes. His lectures on Native American stewardship of the land aided Otis in his drive for the conservation of the National Parks and respect for Indian traditions.

By 1900 Otis had visited Southern California. He was entranced by the quality of light and the clearness of the air. In 1919 he returned to stay, and for the next ten years, he painted the desert, beaches, trees, valleys and mountains. The country was virtually untouched, and he brought a new spirit and technique to the west.

Otis soon attracted the attention of Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios in Hollywood. He contracted with Otis to design sets for his movies. Shortly after, Otis was directing crews of artists to paint scenery under his tutelage. The professionalism taught to his artists by Otis greatly improved the theater offerings of the time.

During these years, Otis served as Chairman, West of the Mississippi, for the American Artists Professional League, Inc. He spent many hours lecturing to artists foundations and societies, leading to the acclaim for his work that has continued since his death in 1962.

George Demont Otis achieved fame as an artist and teacher who had exhibited at many major museums in America. He credited John F. Carlson for helping him refine his skills as a teacher. Through Otis’ works and lectures, he became known in the art world of the 1920s as an innovator of a major movement in art.

Otis moved to San Francisco in 1930, joining artist friends living in an art conclave on Montgomery Street. He later moved to the studio of Arthur Putnam, sculptor, near Golden Gate Park. Otis married a San Francisco business woman and artist, Clara Van Tine, in 1931.

In 1934 George and Clara Otis opened the studio and gallery in Kentfield, Marin County. The studio became a showcase for Otis’ carvings, etchings, stained-glass windows, and paintings as well as Clara’s pottery, woven fabrics, and metal works.

Visitors from around the world found their way to the studio during the next thirty years. Otis was a social man and welcomed them all. The studio-home was more than a workshop to Otis, it was a wellspring of creativity, and he never failed to share his enthusiasm. Over five hundred of Otis’ students became professional artists. He encouraged them to develop diverse styles, forming the school of Western Impressionism early in the twentieth century.

Otis modeled his forms with strong light and dark contrasts, a play of warm and cool Colors. His brushwork was conspicuous, and consisting of wide, bold strokes of high key colors varied in length and size.

He was represented in the Cheney Collection, New York; Kahn Collection, Chicago; Municipal Collection, Chicago; Carnegie Collection, Colorado and many others.

He was a member of the Chicago Society of Art, Cliff Dwellers of Chicago, Society of Western Artists, Marin Society of Artists, Western Arts Academy Foundation, Laguna Beach Art Association, and Los Angeles Painters’ Society. In addition he was a founder and life member of the Palette and Chisel Club of Chicago and was appointed Chairman, West of Mississippi, American Artists Professional League.

Otis became a leader in the conservation movement. Through his exhibits and lectures, he fostered concern for preservation of natural scenic beauty, leading to the establishment of Point Reyes National Seashore in 1962, the year he died. His niece, Grace Hartley, said that he would have been pleased by the legislation creating the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. She believes that the intense feelings Otis had for the natural beauty and history of this country has been a factor in the growing movement to conserve and protect what remains of our unspoiled landscapes. His paintings of “Muir Woods Creek” and “Grain Time” hung in the White House during the passage of this bill.

George Demont Otis became known as a modern day Renaissance man. He was a painter, etcher, lithographer, stage designer, cinema artist, woodcarver, illustrator, author, poet, teacher and a worker in stained-glass. He influenced hundreds of artists who were his companions and students. Otis, at age 82, left a heritage of art that reflected his deep love and respect for this land.

Ada Garfinkel, writing for the Marin Independent Journal in November, 1977, on the occasion of a posthumous exhibit of Otis’ paintings at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area Visitors’ Center in San Francisco, noted, “his paintings of the open, rugged terrain and natural beauty of Marin are rendered in impressionistic blocks of color and light and are as compelling for their pictorial realism as for their tonal nuances, airiness and wonderful spatial depth...Otis would undoubtedly have been proud to know that the Society of Western Artists which he founded, is the co-sponsor of this exhibit.” George Demont Otis had a firm belief that all noble art is the expression of man’s delight in God’s work. “God has loaned us the earth for our life; it belongs as much to those who come after us and those whose names are already written in the book of creation, as it does to us. We have no right to neglect any obligations that are within our power to bequeath.” Otis encouraged his fellow artists always to strive for the feeling, that something has been added toward the betterment of civilization. He would advise them, “If it is a painting you are working upon, make it your best.” This is the inspiration and message George Demont Otis has left as his legacy to the world.

"For nearly two years an exhibition of paintings by George Demont Otis, including a number of paintings now being exhibited at the Sonoma County Museum, was held in the California State Library in Sacramento. It was by every measure a great success. Not only did art connoisseurs enjoy these paintings, they were enjoyed by hundreds and hundreds of Californians who were experiencing, some for the first time, the power of landscape art, as evidenced in Otis’ work. George Demont Otis is one of those American painters who remind us what landscape painting is all about: the re-envisioning of the familiar, the spiritualization of the ordinary, the discovery of pattern and poetry in the natural environment.

One does not need a doctorate in art history, nor even an experienced eye, to be drawn into the compelling world of these paintings. True, it helps to know that George Demont Otis ensconced himself in a rustic cabin in the township of Kentfield in Marin County in 1934 and spent the next twenty-eight years painting the North Bay. It is also important to note that Otis became the leader of the Western Impressionist School, and that his work demonstrates the continuing vitality of Impressionism and Post Impressionism through the upheavals of the 1930s, the war years, and the postwar boom. Building upon the prior work of his painterly predecessors in Marin, Thad Welch and Percy Gray, Otis celebrated in dozens and dozens of delightful canvases the compelling landscape, flora and fauna, and enchanting atmospherics of the North Bay. All in all, Otis’ work represents one of the most comprehensive documentations through art of a California region. Because of Otis, we can ever re-experience the beguiling presence of a sea and bay-girded, eucalyptus-guarded landscape, its hills lion-colored or green, depending upon the season, its skies suffused with a golden mellow light.

Not only does George Demont Otis document for us a world we almost knew, a world increasingly threatened by growth and development — he does it in a most non-intimidating manner. Otis’ paintings are, first and foremost, a pleasure to regard. Simply, directly, honestly, Otis presents to us what he is seeing with a skill that abhors pretension and a regard for color that prefers subtlety to fireworks.

In this carefully curated exhibition, we can enjoy not only many of the best paintings by George Demont Otis, we can also celebrate the North Bay in all its composite glory, including its historical reverberations. Through Otis’ eyes, for example, we see the Valley of the Moon not only as Otis saw it, as an enchanted glen in which eucalypti and oak stood sentry, but as Jack London saw it as well, a generation before Otis, and established there his Beauty Ranch: as the embodiment, that is, of all that the North Bay, including Sonoma County, offered in the matter of California living.

Are we aware today that our marshlands and tidelands are among our most precious and endangered landscapes? Then let us behold a Marin inlet as painted by Otis in the 1930s, with a stately heron standing between a shore of gold and an inlet of azure blue and mountains and sky sweeping across the horizon. Here Is a painting sufficiently capable in and of itself to convince all of us that such places, such moments of natural repose and beauty, must forever be kept possible through proper stewardship, lest we lose the essential meaning of California itself. For other examples of stillness and beauty, let us follow with Otis along Inverness Creek as it runs into Tomales Bay at Point Reyes or survey the marshlands which eventually became Hamilton Field as they awaited their human history.

Seeing Mount Tamalpais through Otis’ eyes, hazy and mysterious in the distance, we can understand why the Miwok people considered it sacred; and from this painting, and from so many others of Otis’ as well, we find ourselves mysteriously bonded to our region, if only in desire, as were the Miwok, the Castanoans, and the Ohlone.

Himself living in a Kentfield cottage, Otis showed a preference in his paintings for intimate and rustic architecture in dialog with landscape. The paintings in this exhibition abound in charming vernacular buildings, at one with their surroundings.

From these vernacular buildings, paradoxically, so seemingly haphazard in the siting and construction, emerges a conviction of civility: a sense of people and landscape in harmony, found by so many painters, including many Americans, in the South of France, but found by Otis on the Mediterranean-like sunny shores of the North Bay. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of viewing Otis’ work, aside from the ever-present eucalyptus, are the glimpses he affords us of the built environment: the Palace of Fine Arts seen from the Presidio highlands with Alcatraz in the distance, the cottages and suburban villages of the Belvedere Peninsula, the working wharves of San Francisco, or the city seen across the Bay from Sausalito on a moonlit night, an iridescent back-lit Atlantis rising from the sea.

Of continuing importance in any Otis painting are the trees: the eucalyptus, first of all, imported from Australia and taking to the Bay Area like a native plant; but birches and sycamores as well, and the equally paradigmatic Monterey cypress and redwood. These trees bespeak California in a special way, and no one has caught their presence and grandeur more lovingly than Otis.

During the Otis exhibition at the California State Library, visitor after visitor took the time to come into my office and tell me how much he or she had enjoyed Otis’ work. Again and again, two themes emerged in these conversations. George Demont Otis has introduced so many first-time viewers to the power of art as a way of re-envisioning the world around them. George Demont Otis has again and again helped them see — and thus appreciate — California in a new and better way. And now the opportunity that was available in Sacramento — the opportunity to experience a skilled, loving, celebratory, and accessible California artist — moves to Santa Rosa, to a city and a museum on the northern edge of Otis country.

How wonderful, then that these paintings are coming home to the northern boundary of the region which nurtured Otis’ life and work. That region, Marin and Sonoma counties, remains in so many ways as beautiful and compelling as it was the day Otis established his home in Kentfield in 1934 and dedicated the rest of his life to seeing and documenting through art his chosen and beloved landscapes."

-Written by Dr. Kevin Starr. Taken from the forward to the catalog 'The California Collection.'