At the opening of this exhibition, Milford's daughter Maria Zornes Baker and her husband Hal shared a multitude of stories from Milford's life, his work ethic, his teaching, and his art.

In the early 1930's, Milford was in his twenties, energetic, enthusiastic, and daring. He was part of a group of watercolorists who painted outdoor subjects in a style which came to be known as "the California Style." The California Style was incorporated into much of the painting produced by artists working in the "WPA." The WPA hired artists of all kinds to create public art. By 1933, he was receiving awards for his watercolors which he produced for the P.W.A.P. art project. He won a one-man show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where one of his watercolors was chosen by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt to hang in the White House.

In 1943, Milford was drafted into the Army even though he was 34 years old. He was assigned as an army artist and was sent to the South Pacific, taking him to China, Burma, India and other exotic locales.

Milford was sickened by the poverty and conditions people had to endure because of the war. When Milford met his "Indian Boy," the boy had no shoes or suitable clothing. Milford used his own money to buy clothes and shoes for the boy, items he earned for carrying Milford's art supplies.

After the war, Milford did an oil painting, "Portrait of Pat Zornes," again suggesting the influence of Modigliani and Picasso. Her horizontal gaze is intersected with her long vertical hair and straight arms, lines echoed in the bow of her dress. Pat was Milford's second wife and the mother of Maria Zornes Baker.

His painting from the studio window was done in Carmel, Utah, yet another example of how Milford strove to establish the vertical and the horizontal in designing a painting. Milford bought the property for it had once been the beloved home of one of Milford's idols, Maynard Dixon. This view was painted by Milford many times as it was by Maynard Dixon before him. Both artists were captivated by the location and arranged to have their ashes spread on these hills.

After the war, Milford experimented and developed his own personal direct painting style and he became well known as a key figure in the Regionalist American Scene Painting Movement. Milford went out of his way to free his time for painting. He would take teaching jobs and painting assignments, but never long term. In the early 1950's, Milford even took a short seasonal job working construction for the Thule Airforce Base in Greenland. Even though the base was 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the job paid well and allowed Milford the freedom to paint the rest of the year. He followed trips to Greenland with trips to Mexico where he would thaw out.

This exhibition at the Grace Hudson Museum runs through October 13.

Their website invites you to come and experience "the exceptional work of James Milford Zornes (1908-2008), who preferred the term "painter" to "artist" when describing himself. An inspired American watercolorist saw himself as a common man sharing his subjects with the public. This painter’s work spanned nine decades and his travels took him around the world, painting and teaching as he went. While he painted in several mediums, he developed an international reputation based on his watercolor landscapes. His rhythmic, direct, simplified style of brushwork remains an important influence on watercolorists, especially the workshop students from Milford’s fifty years of art instruction. This exhibit is organized by the Grace Hudson Museum and curated by Maria and Hal Baker, Milford's daughter and son-in-law."

When Grace was 14 years old, her parents recognized Grace's talent and at great expense and sacrifice, sent her to study art at the San Francisco School of Design in 1879 followed by studies at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art.

Grace excelled in her studies and won awards for her work and admiration from her fellow students. She earned a reputation as "the lightening striker" for her ability to render drawings quickly.

With Grace's success in school came a streak of independence. Against her parents wishes, at age 19 she married William Davis, a man who was 15 years older. The marriage lasted only a year, and in 1885, Grace returned to Ukiah to live with her parents. In 1890, she married John Hudson, a physician with the North Pacific Railroad Company.

The young couple shared a passion for the Pomo Indians living in and around Ukiah. Due in part to Grace's success as an artist, John Hudson gave up his practice of medicine and dedicated his time to the archeological and cultural study of the Pomo Indians. Grace's paintings and portraits of the Pomo people were popular in her day and continue to portray the Pomo with a deep understanding, sensitivity and beauty. John became a renowned ethnologist. His collection of Pomo baskets and native American artifacts can be found in the Smithsonian, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum.

Throughout their lives, Grace and John Hudson dedicated themselves to the Pomo people. Because of their efforts, we have an opportunity to know them too, not as passing footnotes of history but instead as well rounded and and complete people. Grace's portraits give us an opportunity to gaze into the eyes of her subjects, her friends, and know some of the richness she enjoyed with her life among these people.

The paintings pictured in this article are currently on display at the Grace Hudson Museum and are published courtesy of the museum's curator, Marvin Schenk.

Grace reveals the Pomo mythology behind her painting The Dawn of Song. Grace writes, "After the Sun was hung in the sky, the leaves grew green, the flowers came and the whole world was happy. But having been so long in the darkness, it was a quiet world with only the sounds of the night ... until La-Mu, the Gopher Man, discovered sweet notes in the hollow step of an elderberry bush."

Grace's painting Little Jack relates the mythological story of how fire came to the Pomas (Northern Pomo people). According to the myth, Gopher and Rabbit retrieved fire from a people to the East. To remember the myth, the Pomo they would burn both ends of their flutes.

Next to My Namesake Mr. Hudson, the placard relates how Grace's friend Maggie sometimes asked Grace to take her newborn son to see "Mr. Doctor Hudson." Grace would play the part of nurse and attend to the infant's needs in her mother's brief absences. Grace commented on the baby's "delicious purple in his skin and fire in his eyes." She made him the subject of at least a half dozen paintings.

Her 1891 portrait of a sleeping Pomo baby, entitled "National Thorn," was the first in her series of numbered oil paintings which grew to over 680 works by the time of her death in 1937. This painting is part of what propelled Grace's growing fame and the growing interest in her work.

In April, 1897, Yokia Treasures was published in Frank Leslies Monthly Journal within an article by Ninetta Eames. She wrote,"The three things most highly prized by the native Californian are his child, his basket and his dog. In 'Yo-ki-o' Treasures,' Mrs. Hudson has grouped the three with a felicitous regard for harmonious composition, the enormous basket forming the background for a half-clad child and a mongrel cur occupying relatively important positions in front. One's interest centers on the wonderful basket, whose mesh is so exquisitely delicate that only a microscope could do it justice. The stitches are set in almost as fine as threads in linen, and the artist seems hardly to have missed one. Such painstaking detail gives to (the picture) an historic value, for the art of basketry is well nigh lost to the tribes; and thus exact representation of the beautiful fabric of a Pomo basket will one day furnish a study for anthropologists."

In The Bride, a contemplative young Pomo girl is pictured on the on the eve of her wedding, She is surrounded by items of her dowry, baskets, ear sticks, and clamshell disk beads. Most of the items in this painting are in the collection of the Grace Hudson Museum. Both the items and this painting have remained in the possession of the Hudson and Carpenter families to this day.

Below is the link for the Grace Hudson Museum. It is located approximately 115 miles north of San Francisco, a two hour scenic drive north on Hwy 101.

Susanna and the Elders comes from the book of Daniel. In the story, a woman is trapped by two elders while she is bathing in private on her own land. The woman refuses their sexual advances and in retaliation, the men accuse her of adultery, and she is subsequently sentenced to death. The woman's life is spared only when the prophet Daniel uncovers discrepancies in the stories told by the two elders.

Thomas Hart Benton's rendition of this Bible story is most interesting in that he pictures the elders as Missourians of the 1930's, including himself as one of the elders. His painting was a shocking piece in its time, as it was a pointed critique of the hypocrisy and repressed sexuality of some religions. Benton goes out of his way to offend this hypocrisy by painting his classic nude with pubic hair, a detail often omitted in most fine art painting and pinup art of the time.

Benton's painting was meant to elicit response, and he could not have come up with a better one than if he had scripted it himself. Some of the initial public reception of Benton's Susanna and the Elders is recorded in In Thomas Hart Benton: A Life, by Justin Wolff. "The director of the museum, Meyric Rogers, threatened to ban the painting from the show on the grounds that it was "much too nude." Rogers acquiesced, however, and exhibited the painting, though with a rope around it to prevent viewers from taking too prurient an interest in its details, such as Susanna's pubic hair. Nevertheless, some local viewers expressed outrage: Mary Ellis, for instance, a sixty-five-year-old pastor, exclaimed, "The nude is stark naked. It's lewd, immoral, obscene, lascivious, degrading, an insult to womanhood and the lowest expression of pure filth." Benton, though, pretended to be unperturbed; upon hearing about Ellis's comments, he responded, "That's funny as hell."

When Grant Wood was growing up in Iowa, one of his fondest memories was of the threshing time. During the harvest, winter wheat and oats needed the kernels of grain to be separated from the straw stalks and the chaff. In much the same communal effort as an Amish barn raising, Iowa farmers would work together. Women would cook and serve to keep their husbands, fathers, sons, brothers and neighbors well fueled for the task. Not only did the threshing fill a pressing agricultural need, but provided a time when the values of friendship, hard work, sharing and community were strengthened.

Grant Wood's Dinner for Threshers teaches a lesson of cooperation and community spirit. The fabric of the American ethic has more than the threads of our highly valued individualism, but also a strong heritage of shared communal endeavor and mutual benefit. Without it, the barns would not have been built and the crops not brought to market. This message was especially poingnant during the Great Depression, as the only way many individuals could stand on their own was with the assistance of a helping hand. Once helped and established, it was understood that it was incumbent to offer a helping hand to others.