Summer in Mendocino

Dorr Bothwell

In Bruce Levene's interview-style biography of Dorr Bothwell, Straws in the Wind: An Artist's Life as Told to Bruce Levene (Levene, B., Bothwell, D. 2013, 2018. Pacific Transcriptions.), Bothwell states: "What struck me about Men?docino were the fences—that wonderful, weathered, bleached wood. So sensitive, so beautiful." The theme of the northern California artist colony's fences was a recurring one in both the paintings and screenprints of Bothwell, so much so that in the early 1960s she created a series of 30 fence paintings for a show at the Bay Window Gallery, selling out of the works before they could be moved to their final destination, an exhibition at San Francisco's De Young Museum.

Here, the flowers so frequently connotated with coastal California - the nasturtium - peek brightly out from between aging Victorian pickets. In the distance can be seen the Mendocino headlands where the mouth of the Big River meets the Pacific.