Helen Clark Oldfield (1902 – 1981)
Two Bottles
18 x 14 inches
Oil on canvas board, 1943
Signed “Helen Oldfield” lower right

BIO:
Helen Clark Oldfield was born in Santa Rosa. Her father, James E. Clark, invested in local hops farms. He was a director of the first Santa Rosa Bank.

Oldfield lived at 547 Mendocino Avenue, in one of the finest custom-built homes in town. She was the oldest child of the family. They spent summers in their beach cabin at Jenner-by-the-Sea.

She was a good student and graduated from DeWitt Montgomery High in Santa Rosa with college standard grades. Unfortunately, this idyllic situation tumbled down suddenly. due to a fraud scandal at the Bank, her father forfeited most of his assets in order to make good on his client’s losses.

At the time when her high school friends were going east to college, Oldfield followed her family to a new life of farming. She found this life frustrating as there was little time for her interests after conclusion of her daily duties. Here she developed her natural gift for sophisticated needle work. At the time she also took a correspondence course in industrial design and became an expert tailor.

Her family was not happy with the farming arrangement. They decided to move to Oakland. In 1921 they purchased a home at 318 Hemphill Place. From there everyone could seek gainful employment and Helen at last had the opportunity to enroll in an excellent art college. She signed up at the California College of Arts and Crafts on Alliston Way, Berkeley. She took every design class available plus one drawing and painting class. On Broadway, in Oakland, she found a job at the Novelty Electric Sign Company. After gaining initial experience there, Helen Oldfield soon found a much better job as assistant to Geo. L. Collins, a noted designer in the Hearst Building of San Francisco.

During her second year at C.C.A.C., Helen was told about a famous California artist just back from France who was changing the art scene in San Francisco. She decided to attend one of his “Modernist” lectures. The speaker she met was Otis Oldfield. In April of 1925, Helen enrolled in Oldfield’s “Still Life Painting” Class at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

Helen and Otis married at the end of 1926 in Ralph Stackpole’s Stone yard and were the darlings of the San Francisco artistic community. Their wedding made the front pages of all the local newspapers.

The couple quickly moved from Oldfield’s studio in the “Monkey Block” to a small apartment on Telegraph Hill. This tiny space soon contained Otis’s bookbinding and art studios, Helen’s design workshop and a new nursery for the two little girls born in 1926 and 1928.

Although the Depression was at its height, Otis continued to support his family by teaching at the California School of Fine Arts. He was exhibiting all over the country and gaining a very broad reputation. Helen Oldfield was continuing her creative design and needlework and painted along with Otis whenever time offered the opportunity. People began to link their painting styles, relegating Helen to the role of student and follower.

This situation upset Helen so much that she gave up the idea of showing her work independently. She decided instead that she would concentrate on professional tailoring jobs and continue to work on commercial fabric design orders. Through these contacts, she accepted quite a few painting commissions and began experimenting with her signatures, using at times only her first initial or simply “Gina”, which was part of her middle name.

Through an associate’s timely recommendation, Helen Oldfield was offered a teaching job at the Sarah Dix Hamlin School. She started with art classes for lower school girls. She was so innovative and popular at the school, that by 1946 she was given more classes including painting and art history for the upper school academy. By the time she retired in 1971, Helen had served as Head of the Hamlin School Art Department for 15 years.

After retirement and the death of her husband, Helen Oldfield threw herself into a free and independent artistic life. She invented a new style in her oil painting with softly blended colors in a smoother application to the canvas. Her main expression turned to visionary fantasies and intricate proverbial allegories. Much of this work was done in the form of large graphic figurative designs.

Her first gallery exhibit began in 1972. She sold six drawings in her new deco-graphic style through the Valley Art Gallery in Walnut Creek. She also sent drawings to the Arts and Crafts Co-op, Inc. in Berkeley and entered the San Francisco Art Festival. In the same year she completed a private commission for a large male nude in her realistic style. Helen was often asked to do portraits on commission due to her ability to make a true and luscious likeness.

In 1973 Helen exhibited and sold four more drawings at the Godfrey Gallery in San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Hotel. She was by now a member of the Sonoma Valley Art Center where her work was shown regularly. She exhibited with and was an active member of the Artist’s Equity Association throughout all of these years. In 1974-75 Helen sold four of her new acrylic paintings on canvas through her connection with the Valley Art Center. Her success continued to climb steadily through the years of 1976-1978.

Helen Oldfield had suffered with arthritis for many years. In 1974 she broke her hip and became somewhat immobile. Her health and energy deteriorated during the late 1970’s. Nevertheless, she continued to concentrate on developing her complex figurative drawings and watercolors in various mediums. In 1980 Helen became a resident of the Laurel Heights Convalescent Home on California Street. The owners hung a major retrospective exhibit of 30 paintings from all the periods and styles of Helen’s creative work. She died there in 1981.

Fortunately that year she had just completed an interview: “Otis Oldfield and the San Francisco Art Community,” for the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library at U.C. Berkeley. A separate 1975 Oral History transcript is also available from the Marin County Free Library, San Rafael.

In 2003, the San Jose Museum chose Helen’s Brown Bowl for their exhibit of California paintings titled: “The Not-So-Still-Life”. This exhibit traveled to the Pasadena Museum of California Art from March to June, 2004. Helen’s painting was selected for one of the photographs on the “Opening Party” invitation as well as a full page reproduction in the Exhibition Catalog.

Additional images and details are available from hello@HeliclineFineArt.com