| Dorr Bothwell, a native
Californian born in San Francisco in 1902, is considered one of our most prominent Bay
Area women artists. She is a painter, printmaker and instructor who is dedicated to seeing
and teaching others to see. She began early to realize the direction she was destined to
take. At four, she announced to her father that her ambition was to become an artist. Even
then she had the determination to be a woman artist. She
began her studies at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where she met
Rudolph Schaeffer, founder of the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design, who became her
instructor and greatest influence. He encouraged her to befriend color and taught her how
to "see." As Dorr recalls, "He not only made you see color, but made you
see design and see pattern in nature, see that there is design and order in everything
around you."
Incorporating Schaeffer's lessons, Dorr Bothwell developed
a special way of seeing. "I have a view which helps me to see how carefully
everything is integrated...how carefully everything is made..." Schaeffer's lessons
did not end there. "He taught me how to mix those colors, how to get them. They
weren't something that you struggled with. They were friends."
This was only the beginning of Ms. Bothwell's close kinship
with color, which led to a deeper dedication. The result was a clear definition of color,
pigment and light. "Color is a neural sensation. Pigment is something else again;
it's a substance that reflects the vibrations of the light to the eye; those vibrations
affect us just the way the vibrations of music do...they become part of you. Color does
the same thing, but light is instantaneous. It works so fast that we have a tendency to
think that the colors are out there. But we put them out there ourselves." |
Ms. Bothwell's Quaker background
taught her at an early age to commune "within," to "wait to be told...in
their writings (great artists), you'll find they always knew that something was painting
through them. They were told what to do." She
feels it is the responsibility of an artist to "silence this know-it-all part of us.
Break through the concretion of facts we have collected to achieve the vision that we had
as children and that we must have as artists."
She sees the artist's life as "being a different way
of life, where the accents are all incredibly different," centering solely on one's
artwork. Perhaps one of Dorr Bothwell's most eminent contributions to us is her book, Notan,
another course from Rudolph Schaeffer. Notan is the Japanese word meaning
"dark/light." Ms. Bothwell defines it as: "The theory that opposites don't
conflict, they complement."
Dorr Bothwell is a very special lady who possesses the
quality of determination, which she first used to establish herself as an artist and later
applied it to gain a closer relationship to, and understanding of, color, light and
energy. She maintains this determination in order to survive as a woman artist. She is an
accomplished artist and a learned instructor who is willing to openly share her knowledge.
Dorr Bothwell is a creative artist who is not afraid to venture into different
experiences, who has traveled to various countries, participated in different cultures and
experienced different ways of seeing. She is an artist whose eyes are wide open and ready
to experience. An artist of solitude, Dorr Bothwell values her quiet place, where she
sees, where she paints... |
