In this handout, learn about Marion Cunningham, original namesake to the Bakersfield Museum of Art, and one point perspective.

This lesson is suitable for a wide age-range with a limited materials list: paper, pencil, ruler, and eraser.

Dennis Ziemienski, a native San Franciscan, is an internationally known painter, illustrator, and designer. In the summer of 2012, BMoA featured a selection of Dennis Ziemienski’s artworks in

a solo exhibition titled Lost and Found: Paintings of the Central Valley. His sharp and richly colored images borrow much of their inspiration from early 20th century paintings and posters.

California based Dorothy Churchill-Johnson has continuously striven to integrate her skill into expanding the understanding of hard-edge realism in painting – a style that realistically renders its subjects but is also characterized by an application of solid or flat color. In Evidence of Change, Churchill-Johnson centers her attention to a single withering leaf and the fence on which its stem sits. Her subjects exist in the moment while creating a barrier for a landscape the viewer cannot traverse. 

Artist Kuzana Ogg was born in vibrant Bombay, India in 1971. Her childhood was surrounded by a constant play between layers of bright pigments and pungent aromas, which came to a halt when her family immigrated to England. Her transient lifestyle and work across the world eventually brought her to California’s Central Valley in 2012. Venturi Tube echoes the mechanics of Kern County’s oil industry as an instrument of developing her visual language via urban geometry.

Phil Paradise (1905-1997) was a well-known painter, printmaker, illustrator, and teacher. Known for his illustrations, prints and paintings of flora and fauna in California and South America. His animal-focused prints reveal the shape of the animal, and use abstraction through line and color to complete the work. Create a contemporary animal artwork using color and lines to abstract or exaggerate the appearance of the animal.

Born in New York, Eyvind Earle (1916 – 2000) began his career in the arts by replicating the masterworks of Impressionism and Regionalism, eventually developing his own style that was characterized by the simplistic and undeviating use of the hand. He captured the attention of Walt Disney in the 1950s, who hired Earle as an assistant background painter for an array of films, most notably Sleeping Beauty (1959).

Pamela Carroll is a California-based Realist painter who depicts everyday objects in her work. Motivated by beauty and exploring the inherent truth of an object, Carroll references the rich history of still life painting and embrace the techniques of the Dutch and Spanish masters of the 17th century. The origins of western still life painting began in ancient Greco-Roman art; this genre allowed for exploration of subject-matter by arrangement, which either celebrated material pleasures, or acted as a symbolic warning of the brevity of these pleasures and of life in general (often called a Memento Mori). In modern day, the artist commonly arranges a still life for formal and technical experimentation.