Joshua Meador and some of his artist friends
by Daniel Rohlfing

Joshua Meador had close friendships with many artists, both at Disney Studios and beyond. He enjoyed these associations, collaborations and friendships, sharing many art related events, conversations and painting excursions. Our current gallery exhibition features work from our gallery collection by four of Joshua Meador's artist friends, Ralph Hulett, Stephen Seymour Thomas, Conrad Buff and Bennett Bradbury.

The exhibition includes a large selection of over 30 of Joshua Meador's paintings. Also on view are paintings by Sebastopol's "Wizard of Watercolor." Grace Allison Griffith 1885-1955.

Ralph Hulett painting

Joshua Meador and Ralph Hulett were co-workers, which lead to a life-long friendship. Josh had been at Disney Studios for two years when Ralph Hulett arrived. The two hit it off from their first meeting. Ralph's primary focus at the studio was painting backgrounds used in feature length films.

As a fine art painter, Ralph was well known in the post-war California Scene Painting movement. He trained at the Chouinard Art Institute with Millard Sheets and Phil Dike. He was a member of the American Watercolor Society (AWS) and the California Water Color Association (CWA). He is known for his LA urban scenes, knotted freeway interchanges, old LA's hills, old houses and tunnels. He also enjoyed painting excursions, especially to the coast of California.

In 2007, Libby Meador (Joshua Meador's widow) and Philip (Joshua's son) told us stories about/ the many family painting excursion vacations shared by the Meador and Hulett families.

Ralph's IMDB list of credits is most impressive. He began with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as an assistant artist (not credited), but followed with Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Make Mine Music, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and One Hundred and One Dalmations.

For their first couple of years in LA, Joshua and Libby Meador rented houses. In the late 1930's they purchased a home in La Crescenta. When they moved in, they were welcomed by their neighbors, Helen and Stephen Seymour Thomas. Seymour was 43 years older than Meador, but the two artists hit it off from the moment they met. Josh was keenly interested in Seymour Thomas' years of experience, especially in Paris, and Thomas was interested in Meador's training at the Art Institute of Chicago and his work in animation. Libby was embraced by Helen Thomas, and the women struck a kinship based on their shared experience of being the spouse of a well-known artist.

Seymour Thomas began his artistic career quite young. He was only 16 when he entered the Art Students League in New York and was 20 when he began studies at the Academie Julian in Paris. Throughout his career, he painted celebrity and society portraits. He was commissioned to paint the Presidential portrait of Woodrow Wilson, now in the White House Collection. He participated in the Paris Salon for 20 consecutive years.

In 1938 and 1939, he was a resident artist in Hawaii, painting portraits for clients throughout the islands. While there he painted our gallery's painting of Makapu'u Point in 1938 on Oahu.

Soon after arriving in Hollywood in 1936, Joshua Meador met Conrad Buff. Buff was 25 years older than Josh and was well established in the LA art community.

In 2007 when Libby and Philip Meador visited us in Bodega Bay, they noticed some of Conrad Buff’s paintings on our walls. They were quite familiar with Buff's paintings and filled us in on their friendship with the Buffs. In 1936, Mary and Conrad Buff warmly welcomed Josh and Libby to LA and were most supportive neighbors.

Conrad Buff was born in Switzerland, studied in Munich, and came to America as a 19 year old. After briefly working on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, he worked as a bartender and at other various odd jobs as he made his way west.

Once in LA, the young Conrad Buff met Edgar Payne and worked for him in 1917. Edgar Payne was commissioned to provide murals for eleven floors of the Congress Hotel in Chicago. To get the job done Payne hired other LA artists Jack Wilkerson Smith, Peter Nielsen, Grayson Sayer and Conrad Buff. Buff’s part of the job was to stretch out canvases and paint sky and clouds. By the end of the job, they used 1,100 square yards of muslin and 10,000 pounds of white lead paint.

By the age of forty, Conrad Buff had established himself as a notable artist of strikingly-constructed mountain and desert landscapes of the Southwest, with special attention given to minimal design elements.

His paintings are striking examples of modernism, reducing landscape to shape and blocks of geometrically shaped color. Today his paintings hang in the Los Angeles County Art Museum, the Oakland Museum, and the San Diego Museum of Art.

Joshua Meador knew Bennett Bradbury through Disney Studios, where Bradbury worked for a time as a colorist and draftsman.

Between 1955 and 1960, Meador hosted Bradbury as a frequent guest at his firehouse studio in Carmel Highlands. Between 1955-1960, Joshua Meador rented the old firehouse in Carmel Highlands, living upstairs and using the large downstairs as his studio, which he shared with visiting artists.

Bennett Bradbury came from a very artistic family. His grandfather was Alwin Schroeder, renowned as the greatest cellist of his time, and his mother was Elfrida Schroeder, a star singer in the Boston Opera Company.

After World War II, Bradbury lived in Honolulu, maintaining a gallery and studio in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Hawaii’s post war tourism boom was just beginning and Bradbury’s paintings were highly prized by vacationers. Our painting Hawaiian Shore was done during this period. After Hawaii, he returned to Laguna Beach where he participated in the Laguna Beach Art Association. In 1970, he moved to Carmel where he lived until his passing in 1991.

Our gallery exhibition also has 33 paintings by Joshua Meador, 8 works by Sebastopol's Grace Allison Griffith, other famous California painters of the past, and a selection of contemporary oil paintings by Linda Sorensen.

If you wish to consider purchase of a painting from our online collection, please give us an advance word of your visit, and will have that painting at the gallery when you arrive. (Call or text 707-875-2911)

Thank you so much for the good response we received for last month's newsletter article about the Sagebrush and Solitude, Maynard Dixon in Nevada exhibition which concluded July 28th at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. Our article featured large photos of many of the Maynard Dixon's canvases of the Nevada wilds. It was a thrill to see these paintings exhibited together, a sweeping testament to Dixon's deep connection and love for the wide open spaces of the West.

"Tonight, the Navajos are dancing."

"In a far-away corner of North-eastern Arizona, where their desolate domain reaches its barren leagues beneath the frosty stars—mesa and plain, steep walled canyons and mountain peak, — the tribesmen gather from the remote canàdas, where their hogans stand darkened and silent."

"For nine days they have come from the points of the four winds upon their shaggy little ponies with their wagons and their women and children; the brown little babies rolled safely in their mothers’ blankets, the shy young girls peeping coyly from the wagons, and the restless boys, whose keen prying eyes never miss a movement. Even the dogs and camp kettles look alert—for on this night, the medicine men call to their aid the mighty spirits of the past—the yebitchai, the giant grandfathers of old."

"For nine nights the strange, rhythmic hum of the medicine chant has not ceased in the big ye-bitchai hogan or medicine lodge—for nine nights there the young men, the tireless dancers and sweet singers of the people, have danced between the fires, and the medicine men have anointed the eyes of the young boys with the sacred meal, that they may not be stricken blind when they look upon the strong gods in whose forms the dancers move."

"The ceremony may be held either as a thank offering or as a propitiation of the powers of departed and deified ancestors of the tribe, as the case may demand. Sets of dancers, six to twelve in a set, from different parts of the reservation compete for the honors of their calling, dancing alternately in relays."

"Long before the dance begins the long space between and all around the twelve great bonfires of juniper logs is filled with a dense and restless throng, wild in the many colors of their blankets. The medicine hogan is at the west end of the lane and the dancers’ lodge—a high, circular corral of green brush—at the east. All who can have backed their wagons in behind the fries forming two irregular rows, and these are filled with men, women and children, deeply muffled in their blankets, for the night is biting cold."

"Here and there, amid the throng, a massive silver bracelet or concha flashes in the firelight. Tall, stately figures of the chief’s medicine men stalk through the flickering light, or stand silent and impressive in statuesque poses, while always from within the medicine lodge comes the weird cadence of the chant."

"At last, from the lower end of the lane, comes a shrill “whooh!”—like the cry of some unknown bird—the crowd opens a trifle, and a young man appears waving his arms as he advances. He is clad all in brown velvet—his moccasins are decorated with silver buttons, around his waist is a belt of enormous silver conchas, about his neck an ungainly, bushy wreath of evergreens—but his face is covered with a hideous mask of buckskin, painted an ashen gray and surrounded with a wild wig of goat hair. It is decorated behind with a tall, fan-shaped spread of eagle plumes, lightly swaying as he rolls his head from side to side."

"He retreats into the darkness again and a chief steps forward to address the crowd. He delivers a long harangue in the strange clicking Navajo tongue, his strong voice and gestures seeming to command respectful attention. We learn that he is giving his people a temperance lecture. Shame be it to us that he need to do so."

"At last, after long waiting, we hear that weird whoop again, and the young man who gives the dance, and the Laughing Doctor, the greatest medicine man of the tribe, come out from the medicine lodge a little distance and sit down upon the ground. We hear the faint jingle of sleigh bells, the dry ch-r-r-r-r of rattles far beyond the crowd, then the spreading plumes of the leader appear and eight terrible figures follow him into the glare of the fires."

"They halt in single file and while the Laughing Doctor and the young man make a long, silent prayer of the basket of sacred meal we have time to note their attire. The leader being described there comes an array of lithe and sinewy bodies, dressed in moccasins and “breech elouts, and cach” with its head hidden in a terrible mask, painted to represent some god of Navajo mythology."

"The steady drumming of the moccasined feet, the deep guttural “O-hoho-ho! E-hehe-he he-he!” mingled with the shrill high keyed tenor comes down the scale in a peculiar wave-like movement; it is the cry of the wild things of remote desert fastnesses—which these Navajos themselves are. The song rises and falls."

"Sometimes it is like the grunting of the great bear of the mountains as he grubs between the roots of the mountains as he grubs between the roots of the juniper—like the rushing of a brook—like the wind—like the mingled cry of vultures or the waiting of coyotes in the darkness—and through it all persists the drumming of the feet on the ground and the steady ch-r-r-! of the gourds like a hundred rattlesnakes."

"The song finishes in a humming sound and this set files out to be replaced by another very much the same to the unpracticed eye. But with each set there are two clowns, dressed very much as the dancers in masks and feathers, each carrying the skin of a small animal, which they put through all manner of queer pantomime."

"Old Chief Black Horse steps forward and delivers as speech. He is a fine old warrior type, his fiery little eyes turning upon his brethren with a commanding gleam."

"Then come set after set and song after song, which seem very much alike to us, so we take a walk around the edge of the camp among the ponies and wagons and coffee-pots, sleeping figures curled up in their blankets, head to the fire, Indian fashion."

"Here we find mothers nursing their babies—little brown dumplings, wearing only a calico slip. They blink at us solemnly in the firelight, and glancing beyond them into the dark and frosty horizon, we do not wonder that this is a hardy race; those who survive their infancy."

"At the lower end of the camp, near the dancers’ dressing-room, we come upon a set of them standing apart in the gray moonlight getting a breath with their masks off, humming over in a low tone their next song. We speak to some of them, but they will not answer—they may not speak while they are impersonating gods."

"We make our way shivering back to the trading post and gulp down the hot cup of coffee that has been provided for us—then back to the dance, which goes on till the rale gray of the clear winter dawn lightens the eastern sky, and the long line of the mesas stands blackly visible again."

"The blue smokes of the camp rise afresh into the keen morning air, and already gayly blanketed men and women dash by us on their way to the store—and wagons and ponies and wives and babies follow—returning to their far-away hogans among the juniper hills."

Planning a visit to Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery? Here's a tip: peruse our online collection before you visit. Call or text us telling us which paintings most interest you, and we'll do our best to have the painting(s) there when you arrive. (Due to space considerations, only a limited percentage of our collection is on view at the gallery.)