Kenneth Callahan was a lifelong Westerner, born in Spokane and raised initially in Glasgow, Montana. His family moved first to the Olympic Peninsula and then to Seattle. He studied briefly at the University of Washington, moving on to San Francisco, where he lived a Bohemian life and supported himself as an illustrator for a children's magazine. He first encountered the abstract work of Klee, Kandinsky and Jawlensky through a travelling art dealer. While this work was not particularly to his taste, which tended more along the lines of Thomas Hart Benton and the Ashcan School, the potential of such an approach to art made a big impression on him. His own artistic reputation grew with a show in San Francisco in 1926, after which he travelled the world for two years as a ship's steward. This allowed him to discover painters such as Michelangelo, El Greco, Joseph Mallord Turner and William Blake. Back in Seattle, after some personal adventures, Callahan married Margaret Bundy and gained the patronage of Dr. Richard Fuller and his mother, who were engaged in founding the Seattle Art Museum. In 1933 Callahan received national recognition by participating in the Whitney Museum's First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art. That same year he was hired by Fuller to work at the Seattle Art Museum, an association that continued over the next twenty years. He curated exhibits, wrote a weekly column on art and continued to paint. His work was widely exhibited, and he received three commissions for federal Post Office murals. During World War II he spent his summers as a fire lookout for the Forest Service. The early 1960s were marked by several tragedies: the death of his wife and a fire that destroyed many paintings in his studio. After Margaret's death, Callahan remarried and moved back to the Olympic Peninsula in 1964. He achieved further recognition through exhibits and commissions in the 1970s, including election to the National Academy of Design. Two years before his death in 1986, he moved back to Seattle, where he painted scenes of urban life.Summer DayCelestial MovementNautical Bird
Critical Analysis
Callahan is often identified, along with Guy Anderson, Morris Graves and Mark Tobey, as a Northwest Mystic. Callahan himself did not consider himself as such. Rather he felt that he was a painter of nature and that the symbolic forms present in his paintings were a representation of the way in which our minds process the way we experience nature. For a more detailed discussion of Callahan's life and work, see the engaging essay in History Link by Delores Tarzan Ament.
