Evening at Big Beach
Artist
Phil Dike
(1906 - 1990)
Datec.1960
MediumWatercolor on paper
Dimensions16 x 29 3/4 in. (40.6 x 75.6 cm)
ClassificationsPainting
Credit LineThe Hilbert Collection
Object numberDik-14
DescriptionPhil Dike, born and raised in Southern California, studied at the Chouinard Art Institute and continued his art education in New York City, studying with George Bridgman, Frank Vincent DuMond and George Luks. After returning to California in 1929, he began teaching at Chouinard and was one of the first artists to develop what has become known as the California Style of watercolor painting.By 1935, Phil Dike was working at the Walt Disney Studios, where he taught art and color theory while working on animated films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and The Three Caballeros. After World War II, Dike left Disney and went back into teaching and painting full time.
He and Rex Brandt formed the highly successful Brandt-Dike Summer School of Painting and, during regular school months, Dike taught at the Chouinard Art Institute. Through the 1950s and 1960s, he was a Professor of Art at Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School.
Dike’s beach paintings are always viewer favorites; here he portrays a bustling scene in Newport Beach. By this time he was incorporating many semi-abstract elements in his paintings; here, the horizontal striations of color form a kind of gridwork on which the population of figures play out their scenes.
On View
Not on viewCollections
