Chaffey Community Art Association Museum of Art (CCAA)

Chaffey Community Art Association

Museum of Art

THE BARBARA LINE COLLECTION

Nucleus of the Chaffey Community Art Association Permanent Collection of fine paintings was the Barbara Line Collection. This was a succession of fine paintings donated by Francis and Helen Line, beginning in 1941, as a memorial to their lovely young daughter.

Storm at Sequoia, Emil Kosa, Jr., 1941

Signed “Emil Kosa, Jr.”, lower right

Oil

29 ½” x 39 ¼”

1941 Barbara Line Memorial purchase

EMIL KOSA, JR. 1903-1968

Emil Kosa, Jr. was born in Paris, France, and spent his childhood there and his teenage years in America. He traveled back to Europe several times in the early 1920's to study art in Prague with Thille and in Paris with Kupka and Laurens. He settled in the Los Angeles area in the late 1920's and began producing watercolors depicting local cityscapes.

His ability to capture the deep shadows created by the intense Southern California sunlight made his California Style watercolors stand out in exhibitions. He painted less often in the city after the mid-1930's when he began to travel throughout California and Mexico seeking interesting landscape subjects. He often camped in the high desert and in the central part of the state where he could set up and paint on location without distractions. Farm scenes and rolling hills of golden grass, casting long shadows, became the subject of many of his prize-winning watercolors.

Kosa did not radically change his painting approach after World War II, as many of his contemporaries did, but continued to refine and develop the California watercolor style he helped to originate in the 1930's. He continually received national recognition for these works and is considered one of America's finest watercolor artists.

He worked in the motion picture business from the 1930's to the 1960's as an artist for Twentieth Century Fox Studios and taught at the Chouinard Art Institute and the Otis Art Institute. In addition to painting watercolors, he painted with oil, produced several murals, and wrote articles for national art magazines. He earned two Oscars for special effects.

In 1941, he was one of a number of widely acclaimed artists who took an interest in CCAA,

He was a member of the National Academy of Design, the American Watercolor Society, and the California Watercolor Society.

(Biographical information taken in part from The California Style, Gordon T. McClelland & Jay T. Last.)

Other paintings in our Permanent Collection:

Harvest Time

Signed “Emil Kosa, Jr.” lower left

Watercolor

18” x 24”

1940

1941 gift of artist

What Again (Self portrait)

unsigned