DON VAN DALL, 1930 - 2021
LIFE
Don was born in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1930 to father John Van Dall and mother Lawana Van Dall. He attended Washington and Lee University, and ultimately transferred to the University of Oklahoma to obtain a degree in geology and oil and gas law. There he married Phyllis Perry and had three children.
Don was an attorney for First National Bank in Newport Beach, California, But ultimately returned to Oklahoma, where he accepted a position with Mobil Oil.
Don Van Dall of Boulder Colorado passed away peacefully on Feb 11, 2021 at the age of 90. He leaves behind four children — Leslie Friedman, Dirk Van Dall, Kristin Ladd, and Amanda Van Dall.
Visit Don Van Dall's obituary website
ART
Don was a committed and prolific oil painter for his adult life. Influenced by Expressionist figurative painters such as Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Oscar Kokoschka, Don favored large canvases with unflinching emotional interpretations of the human figure, most often the female form. Broad gestural brush strokes often framed women in extremes of emotion— laughter, anger, passion—while other canvasses were more tempered lyrical abstractions of our natural world.
Don remained a hipster into old age, keeping him engaged in our world’s affairs. It was a key ingredient keeping him sharp til the very end of his life.
Though singular and often solitary, Don was warm and expansive to those close to him. A whip-smart, opinionated, bon-vivant globe trotter, he nonetheless found serenity in his later years with his family and his painting. It is our profound hope that he still has his finger on the world’s pulse and that with his head in the clouds, he is interpreting an image of the afterlife on a giant, gold-framed canvas in the Cosmos…
"Don Van Dall is an oil man, now living in Jakarta as Vice President of Mobile Indonesia. He has also been a law student, actor, writer, and campaign manager for Scranton Republican run against Goldwater in 1964. He is, of course, an American, born 43 years ago in Oklahoma. I think he brings to painting two basic qualities which lie beyond purely artistic training and stylistic influence–the first being his Americanism, the second his oil field experience. His Americanism is evident in the frequently large scale of his paintings, and the large optimism, implying limitless, expansive growth, in paintings of indeterminate organisms like enormously magnified microscope slides of suavely globular molecular structures. At the same time, I hazard a guess that his presumed technical knowledge of oil's chemistry may have quite a lot to do with the form taken by these organic works, whose colours, cool blues and greys dominant, enhance the sense of dynamic expansion. Vital and optimistic as these are, there is another side to his creativity no less American, evident in figurative works such as Incomplete Liberation, three nude girls on a blue beach, another seated in a chair. Despite strong suggestions of Matisse in the figures and their hedonistic 'fauve' setting, the face of the women in the chair, and even more so, a dormant explosiveness in the long fuses of richly suave brushstrokes, remind one of a de Koonig's disentegrative violence."
– Richard Walker