About California Contemporary Artist, June Yokell

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 Joie 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.

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 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.