William Ivey (painter)

William Ivey (September 30, 1919 – May 17, 1992) was an American abstract expressionist painter, sometimes joined with the Northwest School of artists. After stints in the US Army and studying art in California, he spent most of his career in Seattle, Washington. Seattle Times critic Deloris Tarzan Ament described him as "the Dean of Northwest Painters".

William Ivey was descended from forward immigrants to the city of Seattle, where he was born on September 30, 1919. Both his parents died subsequent to he was young, and he and a younger sister were raised mainly by their maternal grandfather, who was a house developer, and an aunt. Young Ivey often visited the Seattle Art Museum after its 1933 opening close his grandfather's house, in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. After graduating from Broadway High School he attended the University of Washington as a action student, while as a consequence taking drawing classes at the Cornish College of the Arts. He gradually become more interested in pursuing a career in art, which he'd enjoyed past youth.

His studies were interrupted by the Second World War. Ivey went into the Army, trained as a commando in the First Special Service Force, and served in the Aleutians, Africa, Italy, and France. In cutting edge years he seldom spoke of his wartime experiences, but was known to have sustained a enormous abdominal wound. While in Italy he was adept to view works by Giotto, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio. After the deed Ivey spent three years at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco, where he undertook all-powerful study of forward looking art taking into account such influential instructors as Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, David Park, and Clay Spohn. Friends and fellow students included noted painters Richard Diebenkorn and Frank Lobdell.

In the late 1940s Ivey returned to Seattle. He was employed by the city as a social worker, and had a daughter considering his wife, Helen Taylor. He painted at night in a series of studios, and entered the Seattle Art Museum's Northwest Annual and the Henry Art Gallery's Northwest Invitational shows. He sold his first painting to magpie and gallery owner Zoe Dusanne. In 1954 Ivey, Jack Stangle, Ward Corley, and Richard Gilkey were featured in an exhibition of Northwest avant-gardists at SAM. He formed friendships taking into account fellow artists such as Guy Anderson, Leo Kenney, and Carl and Hilda Morris. In the late 1950s he opened the short-lived Artist's Gallery, Seattle's first co-operative artist-owned gallery, with Alden Mason, James FitzGerald, Margaret Tomkins, and others. In 1960, Gordon Woodside became his representative; the similar year he normal a Ford Foundation grant, and two years later, a ascend from the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities. In 1964 he had his first major solo show, at the Seattle Art Museum; in 1967 he established a Rockefeller Fellowship.

While Ivey was achievement recognition, and was skillful to quit his hours of daylight job, he was notorious for his reluctance to attend foundation parties, do publicity, or direct out commissions, and for his gruff, workmanlike entry to painting. "Painting is something you have to do all the time," he told arts journalist Regina Hackett in a 1992 interview. "If you don't, it becomes too important, too charged behind meaning, and you can't bring yourself to attain it. For me, it's considering tying my shoes in a way."

Ivey in addition to generally disliked teaching, but taught for curt periods at the San Francisco Art Institute, Reed College, and Highline Community College, and furthermore gave private lessons for little groups at a studio he shared later painter Frank Okada in downtown Seattle.

Distaste for promotion likely limited Ivey's popularity – his one and without help European exhibition, arranged by painter John Franklin Koenig, was at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris in 1966 – but he remained a respected, strong-selling player in the Pacific Northwest. SAM held different solo ham it up of his behave in 1975; in 1982 he fashionable a scarce commission and created the largest painting of his career (20' x 8') for the King County District Court in Issaquah, Washington; in 1983 he was named Artist of the Year by the King County (Washington) Arts Commission, and used the $25,000 compensation to construct a studio astern his home in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood; in 1989 the Henry Art Gallery presented a major retrospective of his career.

Ivey was acquainted similar to Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and further members of the 'Northwest School', and was near friends bearing in mind Richard Gilkey and many of the Skagit Valley-based painters who were considered by some critics to represent a second generation of the Northwest School. However, his intensely personal style of confiscation showed more of the change of Still, Rothko, and others he studied under at the California School of Fine Arts. He found inspiration in observation of the real world, but his intense captivation in the painting process transformed what he wise saying into lush abstractions that emphasized color and the portray plane. In Ivey's paintings, shapes are subsidiary to color in the momentum of spaces, and delicate hermaphrodite grays set off glowing patches of adept color.

In a 2014 review of a be active at the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, arts journalist Matthew Kangas speculated that Ivey's wartime experiences may have had a mighty impact upon his art, and suggested that " Ivey channeled — or suppressed — such horrors into modernist confiscation in order to rule and colorless them."

Ivey rarely titled his paintings. He was an greedy fly fisherman, often fishing with his buddy and fellow painter Carl Morris.

He died in Seattle upon May 17, 1992, aged 72, after a year-and-a-half long fight with cancer. He was survived by his wife Helen, daughter Kathleen, and two grandchildren.

Said journalist Hackett, "Ivey was a rough-hewn yet lyrical painter enthusiastic in feeling, not fact. Within the frame of a canvas, he painted a frame following colors pouring out. He wanted to take control of the visual pulse of a scene without bogging it all along in particulars. [...] He wanted to chip the barnacle of language off purely visual sensations. By blurring them, he hoped to restructure them to some kind of native fresh sight. Thus, for anything his disclaimers and tough-guy fortitude, he was a romantic to his bones."