JOHN A. DOMINIQUE
A "POET OF LANDSCAPE"
by Charlotte Berney
In the last part of his life, John A. Dominique became a living
treasure of California art. When one visited him at his Ojai,
California studio, he would talk about his years at the California
School of Design when Armin Hansen and Maynard Dixon were on the
faculty, he would describe his reaction to the paintings at the
Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915,
and he would reminisce about the early southern California art
scene, when landscape was considered the ultimate art form.
Always modest and soft-spoken, Dominique did not express any
awareness of the enormity of his 80 years spent in art during
a tumultuous, formative period. After all, he was still living
it, painting every day, and totally immersed in the contemplation
and expression of his art. When he died on February 20, 1994,
at the age of 100, he was one of the last painters of his exciting
era. He left a body of art work that is distinguished for its
excellence and individuality, a fine legacy of his chosen pathway.
John August Dominique was born in Viserum, Sweden on October
1, 1893, of a family line with a French ancestor, hence the French
name. At age 7, his family immigrated to the United States, settling
in a farming area near Portland, Oregon. A plant nursery man in
Sweden, John's father worked as a florist in Portland and later
became a landscape architect.
Though John was to use the skills learned from his father in
caring for plants and the land, his early inclination was toward
art. An interest in drawing as a youngster led him to study cartooning
and he began supplying cartoons to local newspapers. In 1913,
with a growing interest, John enrolled in the School of the Portland
Art Association, where, according to the art training of the day,
he drew from casts of classical sculptures.
John decided to make art his life's work and in December of
1914, left Oregon for San Francisco. Living in Berkeley where
his sister was attending school, he took classes at the California
Art School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied with early California
painter Perham Wilhelm Nahl and went to lectures by artist/art
historian Eugen Neuhaus.
Following his stay in Berkeley, Dominque crossed the Bay and
enrolled at the California School of Design of the San Francisco
Institute of Art (since 1961 called the San Francisco Art Institute),
where he would study for two years.
Dominique had arrived in San Francisco at a propitious time.
Having recovered from the disastrous 1906 earthquake, the city
was ready, in 1915, to proclaim its resurgence with a world's
fair, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. In an age when
printed information was not omnipresent, fairs were a dramatic
means of exposure to other ways of thinking and seeing. The Fine
Arts Exposition, with works by Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Oskar
Kokoschka and the Italian Futurists, greatly impressed Dominique
and his fellow art students who attended the show every weekend.
Dominque was fascinated by the Modernists and shocked by the
negative comments he heard about them. "People used to walk
through there and laugh and make fun of them," he said. "I
could never understand why people couldn't see the beauty in those
pictures." he added that he thought they were seeing with
their minds and not their eyes.
The result of Dominique's revelation about modern art was that
he would begin painting abstract works, but no until 1925. An
unfortunate result of his experience at the show, he was always
reluctant to exhibit his abstract works because he thought they
might be ridiculed.
At the time, Dominique and many of his artist associates were
painting in a style influenced by the French Impressionists. The
students learned from and were reinforced by the many Impressionist
at the Exposition. Dominique says that his teachers for the most
part taught Impressionist techniques and focused on landscape.
The faculty at the Institute of Art included many who were
or were to become major painters of California art, such as John
A. Stanton, Frank Van Sloun, Henry Varnum Poor, Armin Hansen,
Xavier Martinez and Maynard Dixon. Dominique took classes from
them all and went out sketching with Armin Hansen. Frank Van Sloun,
one of California's most respected artists, became Dominique's
main teacher and mentor.
When Van Sloun opened his own school, The Van Sloun School
of Painting, in San Francisco, Dominique followed his teacher
and enrolled. Though the school closed in 1919, Dominique found
his four years of work with Van Sloun to be richly productive.
The war years intervened, and Dominique enlisted in the U.S.
Army Signal Corps, serving in Camp Meade, Maryland. During his
leaves, the young artist was able to visit the museums and galleries
in Washington , D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. He
was honorably discharged in 1920, and traveled to Santa Barbara,
California, where his father was working as a nursery owner and
landscape designer.
Thus began an era during which Dominique would live a landscape
artist's dream. His father had helped lay out the garden for a
large Montecito estate, which was in need of a caretaker. Through
his father's connection, Dominique secured the job of looking
after the vacant estate. He had a small house and studio on the
premises, which included beautiful views of the Santa Inez Mountains,
a lily pond, trees and flowers. He would live on the Ward estate
for fourteen years, and its scenery is reflected in many of his
early paintings.
During this time, Dominique took courses at Otis Art Institute
in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara School of the Arts. These were
seminal institutions in California painting, attracting plein
air artists who loved the fine weather and unspoiled scenery of
the region.
Two artists prominent during this era were Colin Campbell Cooper
and Carl Oscar Borg, both of whom lived and worked in Santa Barbara.
Dominique studied with them and said he learned a lot from Cooper
and went out sketching with Borg. During this time also, he received
informal instruction from Thomas Moran, who had settled in Santa
Barbara in 1922. He recalls attending Moran's funeral in 1926.
This was a fertile period in Dominique's artistic life. With
the time to paint and study, his innate talent, coupled with training,
came to prominence. His work began to be exhibited widely in Santa
Barbara and Los Angeles, in galleries, art association shows,
libraries and state fairs.
Expanding his repertoire in 1925, Dominique began to do the
abstract work that had so intrigued him at the Panama-Pacific
Exposition. He said he was also influenced by the work of Wassily
Kandinsky, whose book, The Spiritual in Art, and whose
work, he much admired. When asked about whether or not the abstracts
and landscapes influenced one another, he said, "I've often
wondered about that. I've done so many landscapes, and I wonder
if I don't add that to my abstracts."
A true plein air artist, Dominique would go out sketching often
with fellow artists. One of his companions, Anders Aldrin, was
also born in Sweden. Aldrin's daughter Betty Aldrin Bentley, describes
with fondness the family's visits to the Ward estate. Though Aldrin's
Modernist work differed from Dominique's, the two friends and
other painters would go out for a day or even a week at a time,
sketching in Morro Bay, Pacific Palisades, San Juan Capistrano,
or even the Mojave Desert and Mammoth Lake.
Of plein air painting, Dominique said, "I never use photographs
and I never created a landscape in the studio. If I wanted to
do a large landscape painting, I would do the sketch on the spot
and as soon as I got home, would start working on the large canvas."
In his early work on the Ward estate (1920's), Dominique captured
its manicured gardens with smooth lines and tidy brushwork. In
the 1930's his brushwork became bolder and more expressive. An
experimenter who said he didn't want to paint the same way all
the time, Dominique moved in varying degrees between representation
and abstraction in his landscapes. His mature work of the 1950's
and 1960's are in the full style called California Impressionism,
with occasional works that are loose and Expressionist. He once
said, "I approach my canvas as though I never painted before,
as a new thing. I'm perfectly free to do as my feelings tell me
each time."
Dominique's distinguishing characteristic is his power and
the sense of integrity that imbues his work. Though he chose not
to follow his father's line of work, obviously a great deal of
his father's love and caring for the land was passed down. Dominique's
landscapes capture both his devotion to the land and his conviction
that nature is a living, breathing entity with a dynamism all
its own. Standing before a Dominique landscape, one feels both
the harmony and vital life forces that underlie existence.
As such, his works diverge from the occasional blandness for
which California Impressionism has been criticized. His works
are never placid, and recall the dynamic harmonies of the Post-Impressionists
such as Van Gough and Cezanne.
Arthur Millier, artist and critic, referred to Dominique as
"a poet of landscape." In a Los Angeles Times
review on October 8, 1933, Millier said of Dominique's work then
being exhibited at the Egan Gallery: "Dominique stands inside
the landscape which he paints, conscious of other things than
the facts of sight. While painting it, he seems to be the landscape.
He paints the earth, or that fertile crust of it on which we live,
as a living being with flesh of soil, skin of grasses, hair of
trees, and that quality of livingness we call a soul."
In the late 1920's, Alexander Harmer, the famous California
painter of Spanish scenes and founder of the Santa Barbara art
colony built studios for artists on De La Guerra Plaza in that
city. Offered one by Harmer's son, Alfred Douglas Harmer, Dominique
moved his studio downtown about 1927, while continuing to live
at the Ward estate. Dominique had arrived as a painter, achieving
recognition in shows, reviews and sales of his paintings.
With the sale of the Ward estate in 1935, Dominique decided
to spend some time in Oregon, and went to live near Canby, managing
the ranch where he had grown up. In Oregon, he went out often
on plein air excursions with the Oregon Society of Artists and
exhibited his work in group shows. With less congenial weather
for plein air painting, the artists would take a large tarp with
them which they would set up in case of rain.
Dominique painted Oregon's mountains, sketched along the Columbia
River, and searched out covered bridges along country roads. In
1940, he won a first prize at the Oregon State Fair for his painting,
Covered Bridge Over Butte Creek at Scotts Mills, now owned
by the Scott Mills Historical Society.
After a sojourn of eight years, Dominique returned to California
in 1942. Dominique lived in Santa Barbara, then in Los Angeles,
where he exhibited with the California Art Club and had work shown
at the Los Angeles County Museum and Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
During this time, he supplemented his income working at framing
shops.
Asked to manage a frame shop in Modesto, California, Dominque
moved there in 1952, spending his weekends painting along the
Stanislaus and Tuolumne Rivers.
Expressing the "wanderlust" that he said came down
to him from his ancestors, Dominique returned to San Francisco,
then moved to Monterey, California, where he again was instructed
by Armin Hansen. While there, Dominique worked in artist Myron
Oliver's famous frame shop that was a center of artistic life
on the peninsula.
Following this, Dominique lived for a time in Laguna Beach,
then in San Diego, painting and exhibiting all the while. Back
in Santa Barbara, he opened his own frame shop, but soon found
it "took to much time away from painting."
In 1959 he moved to the Ojai Valley just north of Santa Barbara,
one of California's most scenic areas. A plein air painter's dream,
the area offered delightful weather, mountains, canyons, streams,
orange groves and ancient oak trees. Dominique bought a house
in Meiners Oaks, where he maintained a studio and lived until
his death.
Dominque's membership in the California Watercolor Society
and participation in its touring shows during this era, gave his
work wide exposure around the nation.
In Ojai, Dominque's style seemed to bond with the land. His
expressive works portraying the Topa Topa Mountains, Los Padres
National Forest, Wheeler's Gorge and Matilija Creek, are perfectly
rendered to capture the vigor of the landscape along with its
poetry. His creek paintings are among the finest in his repertoire.
Dominque's landscape painting was almost at an end. In 1975,
he developed a hemorrhage in one eye that proved untreatable,
and soon thereafter, the same problem affected his other eye.
This left him with severely damaged eyesight and legally blind.
Characteristic of the man, this did not deter him from painting.
The abstract paintings he had begun doing in 1925 now stood
him is good stead. He continued to paint his abstract daily, having
friends assist him is purchasing paint and arranging them in a
certain order on his work bench. Never did one hear him express
a feeling of self-pity; he continued painting, loved discussing
art and enjoyed hearing about art exhibitions.
The loss of his eyesight, something that might have embittered
others, gave him a special strength and determination to pursue
his art. He created thousands of abstract works that have not
been widely exhibited or evaluated.
Until the abstracts are better known, Dominique will be known
for his powerful landscapes of California and Oregon, which embody
80 years of insight, experience and talent in art. His historical
place in art is a plein air painter who, while partaking of the
best of California's 20th century, still forged his own individualistic
vision.
Charlotte Berney is a writer who specializes in American art.
Her articles have appeared in Antiques & FineArt,Art
of California and Cowboys and Indians. She currently
lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico
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