An American Artist of the American Century
Born in Spokane, Washington in 1918, Rex Ashlock started painting seriously when he arrived in California in the late 1930s. He studied for two years at California School of Fine Arts and later at Berkeley, where David Park in particular encouraged the expressive aspect in his work. A considerable number of ‘plein-air’ watercolors and many oils – an increasingly abstract series of Bridges come to mind - represent the years in the Bay Area.
In 1957 he moved to New York. Gottlieb, Reinhart, Rothko and Kline were all working in ways which influenced him to experiment with Abstract Expressionism. Many of his paintings from this period are investigations of a broad field of a single color marked by subtle tonal changes. However, the female form continued to inspire, and his work from the 1960s includes, too, a large number of nudes.
The nudes even began to come off the canvas as he turned to sculpture, mainly drawing on the inspiration of the female form – but he loved color too! Many of the figures were painted – and before other sculptors were moving in that direction.
His appreciation for expression, color and the female body began to come together in the 1970s with a series of large Bicycle Women, whose power almost enables them to pedal off the canvas – and then, equally dramatic for their curious double perspective, a series of Sea Paintings, some flanked by a female figure, or two, seen through the eyes of “a couple of seagulls”.
In 1980 Rex Ashlock left New York for Spokane, first, and then San Francisco. His work at this point in his life both returns to previously established if occasional interests – portraits, for example – and extends a long-time interest in the calligraphic, the idea of signs, significant marks by his study of Chinese. The sign was a gateway. Where did an image take you? For Rex Ashlock, art was not only a life-long love-affair, it was an ongoing search for meaning.
Since his death in 1999, a number of Ashlock’s works have been sold at auction and privately, while others have been accepted by museums such as the Berkeley Museum of Art and the Monterey Museum of Art.