61. My parents' artwork

"African Amercian Girl" Violet Y. Chew-MacLean 1931-2006

One of my mother's watercolors of an Oakland art student was chosen to be exhibited at the reopening of the de Young museum. She was on a plateau with her health at the time, so she was able to attend the festivities at the reception. This painting was originally part of a series of 50 large watercolor portraits she painted for a fundraiser for the 1990 UNICEF World Summit for Children. (Typically, my dear ma never wrote down the name of her student subjects, so unfortunately, we weren't able to contact the student to tell her of the exhibit.)



Robert Paul MacLean
A rare framed work of my father's from the early 1960's.

My parents met in the late 1950's at Oakland's California College of Arts and Crafts, aka CCAC (Now called CCA). My mother was working on her MFA in painting and my father was a student of printmaking. In the 1960's they married against my mother's family's wishes--said the hell with Chinese conventions--and moved to the burbs of SF, and raised three kids. To give it some perspective--when they married, it hadn't yet been 10 years that interracial marriage with whites and Chinese was legal.

My parents' art skills set a high bar for my sisters and me. When my mother wasn't tending to us, she painted and sculpted non-stop in the family room turned studio. In the early 1970's she created surrealistic and figurative ceramics that were both sculptural and utilitarian. By the late 70's she was experimenting in pushing the bounderies of China painting. She freaked out all the conservative suburban retirees with her feminist subject matter. In the late 80's she returned to painting on paper, where she produced hundreds of large scale water colors portraits. Again, she did not keep good records of her subjects, so I would love to get in contact with anyone who has one of her portraits. (see contact email above) By the 90's she was experimenting in what she called abstract paper "sound" sculpture.
(More art images to come)

One of my favorite things to do as a kid was to watch over my dad's shoulder as he drew grotesque caricatures of politicians in the text of the newspaper columns. My father hasn't practiced printmaking since college, despite his deft drawing skills, and being chosen to exhibit at the 1961 S.F.A.I. 25th Annual Drawing, Print and Sculpture Exhibition at the SFMOMA. As far as I know, he's still doodling caricatures in the columns of the Times and stashing them away.

My mother was very driven and continued to exhibit into the year before she died of cancer in May 2006. Between the two of them, they worked hard for the public school for a collective 60 odd years; teaching generations of Northern California's children on how to pick up their frakken pencils.