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” run by Wayman Adams. The artists who taught there were primarily landscape and portrait painters. My mother and her siblings as well as my grandparents had their portraits painted there and then at 60 my grandmother, a dentist, took up painting. My grandmother's love of painting and my love of her influenced me so much that I knew that I would be an artist by the time I was eight. In high school I took painting classes at the Montclair Museum, in Montclair, N.J.

After graduating high school I went to Goddard College in Plainfield, VT, later taking a study term in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I took classes at the Boston Museum School and worked privately with artists Phil Geraci and Joie de Martelly 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 the Arts), where I received my Bachelors of Fine Art in 1973 and Masters Fine Art in sculpture cum laude in 1982.  

Most of work for the past 35 years has been two dimensional, working in oils, acrylics, pastels and ink. I continue to use Nature, and Landscape as inspiration.

For as long as I can remember I've been drawn to the beauty in everyday life, primarily by looking at the natural world. Simple things, things I notice while walking or looking out a window or seeing a pattern in shadows. While it is not exactly a dream or a memory, it's like entering another world that is right here with us always, carrying with it its sensuality and raw emotion. I'm drawn to painters and writers who describe the physical as well as their psychological response to the land, those who each in his or her way describe the physical or psychological climate of place.  My goal is to transfer to the viewer, my own non-verbal felt experiences.

"In his book, (published in 2005), The End of Art, art critic Donald Kuspit condemns con-conceptual and postmodern appropriation art, because they are generally devoid of aesthetic qualities. Instead, he calls for a return to an Old Masters approach which values technical skill in creating art base on lived and felt experience processed through the subconscious. Such art yields a genuine aesthetic experience.

As descendants of a long lineage of landscape depiction, June Yokell's paintings acknowledge, but do not appropriate those of Odilon Redon, Albert Pinkham Ryder; and others. While she starts with photographs and sketches, finished scenes are from literal. Like those of contemporary artist April Gornik, they are imbued with psychological tensions, memories, dream imagery, and submerged feelings.

The landscape paintings fall into two general categories: Nature, both peaceful and threatening, and components of Nature in close-up allover space...According to Kuspit,"...there are still artists who believe in the imaginative refinement, under the unconscious, of raw social and physical material into aesthetically transcendent art." (p. 177) Yokell definitely qualifies as a New Old Master."

-Alfred Jan, Santa Clara, California