By Jonah Raskin — She was Ray Jacobsen’s wife for 32 years, and what a wildly creative time they had together! She was his muse, flesh-and-blood model, soul mate, travel companion and fellow artist who produced some of her most dazzling work with her husband as collaborator. Their love story unfolded over decades. In a way it’s still unfolding.
Indeed, Barbara Jacobsen has curated an exciting show with some of her late husband’s signature works that will provide Sonoma with a rare opportunity to see the extraordinary creativity of an artist who loved the mountains, valleys and vineyards that he saw all around him for much of his life.
Ray Jacobsen painted Sonoma in all its glorious color and colorful glory. Along the way, he altered the ways Sonoma sees its landscapes and itself.
Ray Jacobsen died in 2007, after a long battle against cancer and nearly half-a-century of making and selling art.
A retrospective of his work ones December 2 at Sonoma’s Bump Cellars. Barbara selected the pieces that will be for sale with help from Tom McCabe and Jeff Holloway from Eminent Design, the gallery on First Street East in Sonoma. Ray’s daughter Dianna Jacobsen, a graphic designer, also helped to choose her father’s work that will include giclée prints. A second show takes place at Calabi Gallery in Santa Rosa in early 2017.
“My approach is a combination of plein-air drawing and concentrated studio painting,” Jacobsen observed in an artist’s statement he once wrote. “I hope through my paintings to share the great joy and reverence I feel for the earth.”
Indeed, Ray’s friends, patrons and neighbors recognized his deep-seated feelings for the land. They also noticed his talent, bought his work and displayed it prominently in their homes.
Patrick McMurtry, a Sonoma artist who knew Ray well and who owns several of his paintings, said, “I’d sit there and watch him work. He was a very quiet and very meticulous. You can tell a Ray Jacobsen work the moment you see it. He’s inimitable. I’m happy Sonoma will have a chance to see it again.”
Ray and Barbara exhibited their work together in the plaza and in the courtyard outside the Blue Wing Inn where they rented an upstairs and lived the lives of genuine bohemians who cared about community and art.
Perhaps no twentieth-century California artist is identified more closely with the Valley of the Moon than Ray, who was named the Sonoma City Artist Treasure in 1997. Barbara accepted that same honor in 2012. “He taught me about light and shadow, color and composition,” she said one afternoon in his old studio on Grove Street, where she has stored his work and sold many of his pieces.
“For years, we’d work on our own individual projects and then we’d show one another what we’d done and make suggestions to one another,” Barbara recalled. “There was great cross-fertilization.” She added, “Ray also encouraged me to sell my art.”
Barbara was born in 1937 in San Francisco, the great granddaughter of Gertrude Atherton, a West Coast literary and cultural icon, and the author of “The Californians,” a pivotal 1898 novel, that’s still read by students and teachers of California history.
“When I was ten I wrote and mailed to my grandmother a poem and drawing for her 90th birthday,” Barbara said. “She replied, ‘so there’s another genius in the family. Keep going.’ Her words scared me. I didn’t want to have to live up to them. My parents expected me to marry a rich man, but I followed my passion for art.”
In her teens and early twenties, she attended UC Berkeley, where she majored in English literature, and later San Francisco State University, where she received a teaching credential. After graduation, she enjoyed a 20-year career in both public and alternative schools.
Barbara and Ray met in 1975 and were married in 1976 on a meadow at Westerbeke Ranch, in a simple but elegant ceremony that she still remembered as “romantic.”
A native of Colorado, where he was born in 1938, and a year younger than Barbara, Ray was a largely self-taught artist who learned volumes about painting and sculpture during a mind-expanding sojourn in England, France and Italy in the early 1970s. Much of his early work, which was stylized and structured, was influenced by the leading American abstract expressionists of the day including Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, though Ray also admired the unconventional landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn and the striking color schemes of Mark Rothko.
After his exhilarating time in Europe and his experience in the counterculture, Ray’s painting became more experimental and more personal, too. He grew steadily as an artist, put his own stamp on his canvases and moved with a sense of joy from oils and acrylics to his favorite medium, watercolors.
Barbara tends to divide Ray’s career into four distinct and yet overlapping phases and styles: abstract expressionist; visionary; realistic and representational, as in his landscapes of Sonoma and the American Southwest; and near the end of his life, pictures of the Pacific Ocean and the Russian River that he and Barbara both learned to love when they lived in Monte Rio in the 1990s.
“Financially, he had his ups and downs,” she said. “Sometimes his work sold really well in galleries in California and Arizona and sometimes it didn’t sell. No matter what, he kept on making art. Come hell or high water, he painted every day. Art was his passion.” Barbara paused a moment, looked around the studio and added, “Ray is still here. I feel his energy.”
Indeed, she does. An artist in her own right, she’s a master of the collage and for the past 22 years has taught a fun class with Audrey von Hawley in which students learn to make collages from likely and unlikely materials.
“I have a lot of happy memories of my marriage,” Barbara said. “Looking back, I think that Ray needed the feminine in me and I needed the masculine in him. We had a good relationship and made a lot of memorable art together.”
The Ray Jacobsen retrospective shows at Bump Cellars, 521 Broadway, Sonoma, through January 2. 707.228.9214. Info@bumpwine.
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