<Begin Segment 29>

PW: And your painting, within the painting, again, too, you moved mediums. Did you go back to oil?

RO: Yeah. So I went back, then I was using acrylic, and eventually realized that there was things that you could do in what I wanted to do, could only be done with oil. There's that quality about you, what you do with oil, how you treat it, how you overglaze it, all these things. At that point, large canvases with large brush strokes and very active, active services. So as a result, I went back to oil and continued on with that for a lot of years until I changed again. [Laughs] As you might hear about that or now.

PW: I do want to hear it. Because I was going to ask you about development of the medium, development of the imagery, development of the movement.

RO: Yeah. And I think because of the, I think because of the exposure in the Bay Area, and even though I had other places that showed my work, I had a gallery in Tucson and Phoenix, I had a gallery up in Napa and another gallery in Los Angeles, West L.A. and so on. So you had all these all these galleries and active, and gee, it was more than I had expected to be associated with. But all galleries, they're not galleries that exists for ever and ever. For whatever reason they all start to fall apart, whether they be financing, whether it'd be interest, change in ownership or whatever. So eventually that kind of moved things along until this gallery in the Bay Area. I was involved in a couple shows, and I was still teaching at the high school. And since they had, I was a part of the stable, I wanted to show that, I wanted to be an active member of that stable, that gallery. I remember going and asking the principal if I could, I wanted to take the Friday off. And on (Thursday) after school I would jump in my car and drive to San Francisco because the reception was on Thursday night. So I could meet the other artists who were showing there, and meet some of the people who were collectors. And then I would do this a couple years in a row, so that was the association. And as a result, they said, "Well, we want to go ahead and have a show of your work," and so they scheduled a show. I did this body of work and took it up there, and they said, "Well, gee, this is San Francisco, the prices are very different." And they said, "Well, let's leave it," because they were basically Fresno. Almost sold the show out, almost show the show out. And normally what happens when the person has a solo show, then we schedule maybe two or three years down the road, because they want the other stable members, and they said, "You know, there were so many people that didn't get a chance to buy your work, let's schedule a show next year." They never do that. So I was busily working. So over the period of time, from there, there was such interest in work, they opened a space at the Stanford shopping center, kind of a high end shopping center, and they opened up a satellite gallery there. They opened up a gallery where the, right where the transit, where the people come in from Oakland, I'm not quite sure, but there's that transit station where people working in San Francisco that are coming in from other areas, and they've rented a little space there where all these people were unloading and loading, and there was that space as well. I probably sold more than a hundred paintings in the Bay Area during that time I was with them.

PW: And what era...

RO: This is late '90s, maybe '96, '97. And then from there until then the gallery went out, and I was with another gallery, and then eventually picked up by then, by the Artist Gallery at Fort Mason, which is an auxiliary of MoMA, and I was with them for a lot of years. Sometimes when I think about that, I've had people now that called me to say, "I bought a painting of yours. Are you still working?" I said, "Yeah, drive down here." I was having a show at the Artist Gallery at Fort Mason, says, "Remember this?" Shows me a photograph of a painting she had purchased. So you were getting this from all different places, and I thought, "Oh my goodness." [Laughs] I mean, one of the things, like being in the right place at the right time, it probably would never happen again. I mean, I don't see that happening at all. I have a hard time, this is the worst place in the world for selling paintings. But every so often now, people are driving down from the Bay Area saying, "I bought this new apartment," wherever and so on, "and we're looking for work," and trying to also educate people here in the valley. There's a lot of wealthy farmers here in town, and just recently, because I work with a decorator in town, and I usually have Piet and Tim handle those things, because she works with them, and so then it's this person who lives in a very wealthy part of town here, I don't know what they farm and so on, but then again, the decorator introduced them to me, and then my work, and then they, with the help of the decorator, chose a piece of work, they installed it there, it's a very large diptych painting. And they had it up there for about a week and so on, and the people were going to go on vacation. So Piet and Tim went over there and took it down and brought it home. They came back and said, "Where's the painting? We want the painting back." They came back and called Piet and Tim and said, "We want to buy the painting." I was surprised, the fact that traditional, non-art people now are buying work, and mostly a lot of work that's being done during certain periods of my development. So that was a surprise for me. And today, every so often, I get a call from some who says, "I'm at this point in my life, I want a change, and make it a little more contemporary. What have you got? I have this much space," and da-da-da. So it happens, very interesting.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.