Luminosity : TheArthur Wright | Dancing Up a Storm

33 x 23". Bleach and acrylic paint on paper

BIO

I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1940. At age 3 the family moved to Seattle where my father worked at Boeing Company. After high school I joined the Air Force and spent three years in Japan, a country that impressed me then as it does now. I am the father of four children, three robust young males and a lady. My first writings were published in the early seventies. My art, which I began around 1969, sold well initially but I semi-retired for a time and after nearly a 20 year vacay I started painting again in 1994.

My career has given me many interesting things to do, including a short call to Hollywood, however, and somewhere in the span of time I joined the board of the Artship which we turned into a seaborne arts venue in Oakland and, due to bad luck was discontinued in 2004. My first internet sale in 1997 was to a buyer from South Africa and one of the most recent to a Swedish representative of the Carnaval, a huge and sprawling global celebration that deals intensively with the peoples of the African Diaspora. For the 2003 Carnaval in San Francisco, my bleach rendering of ‘Califia, Queen of California’ was chosen as the poster cover.

I have had my art shown and honored in various schools and colleges such as Stanford, UCLA, Sonoma State and Santa Rosa JC and the far west such as Marin City, most recently I gave a presentation workshop during the pandemic, which my son and I put on over a two day period at the Kentfield Campus of the College of Marin. The list is growing long. Introducing bleach into my art has been a huge catalyst in the many changes I had to discover while using that reluctant medium; I find it almost mesmerizing with enough nuances to take me to the end of my career. It continues to surprise me even now.