Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, September 28, 2021: Maurice Logan, an American watercolorist, commercial artist and arts educator (#1377)

Maurice Logan (1886 —1977) was an American watercolorist, commercial artist and arts educator. He was a member of the Society of Six, and a professor at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California.

Born in San Francisco, California, Maurice Logan was an expert watercolor and oil painter of California scenes which included the downtown and waterfront areas of San Francisco and other small California towns, California and Arizona deserts and countless marine related scenes.

Logan was part of the Society of Six, a highly influential group in the 1920s led by Selden Gile that combined the bright colors of Fauvism with a sense of region in a loose Impressionist style. The Society of Six exhibited together at the Oakland Art Gallery.

From a young age, Maurice Logan aspired to have a career as an artist. Logan took his first lessons (at the age of ten) from a local California artist Miss Clara Cuff. It is rumored that a family friend paid for the lessons because Logan's father disapproved of his son's art interests. Despite this disapproval, young Logan was encouraged in artistic expression by the many artists who came to paint in the Temescal Lake area and also by the Bohemian atmosphere of writers he met there including Jack London and Ambrose Bierce.

Maurice Logan enrolled in the Partington Art School in San Francisco, and after the school was destroyed by the earthquake, Maurice worked with Richard Partington at the Piedmont Art Gallery. Logan later became the first student to enroll in the post-earthquake San Francisco Institute of Art. From 1907 to 1913, Logan studied with the likes of Theodore Wores, John Stanton, Christian Nahl, and Frank Van Sloun. Maurice Logan's first exhibited painting was in the San Francisco Art Association's 1914 Annual Spring Exhibition.

Maurice Logan continued his studies at the Chicago Art Institute and then returned to California where he studied and then taught for eight years at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA.

By the mid 1930s, Logan had become active in the California School of watercolor painting, which took a bold and direct approach to the regional subject matter that he was already accustomed to painting. Maurice Logan began exhibiting his transparent watercolor paintings and helped form another influential group called the Thirteen Watercolorists. This group which included fellow bay area watercolorists Nat Levy, Rene Weaver, and Harold Gretzner.

For many years, Maurice was an influential art instructor at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Logan was also on the board of directors of the Society of Western Artists, the West Coast Watercolor Society, and other local art clubs. Maurice Logan also juried art exhibitions at the Oakland Art Museum and was a member of the Bohemian Club, where he showed his paintings on a regular basis.

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