HELEN DOOLEY BIOGRAPHY

Landscape painter Helen Bertha Dooley was born in San Jose, California, on July 27, 1907, growing up there. She painted landscapes of the Monterey Peninsula; the country around San Jose and Stockton, California; and occasionally the desert. Between 1952 and 1957, the years of her marriage to Wesley Hodgins, she painted the people and landscape of the Hualapai Indian reservation in northwestern Arizona, at Peach Springs, where her husband taught. In 1959, she painted the lives and ceremonials of the Indians in Taos, New Mexico.

Dooley graduated in 1928, from San Jose State College (now San Jose State University). She taught in the Oakland Secondary Schools, from 1928-1930, later working for the San Jose Department of Adult Education, in 1933-1937. But, she continued her art studies, in 1932, at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco; in 1935, at the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles (while working for the Department of Adult Education); and ultimately, in 1948, at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City. She also studied art with Douglas Donaldson, Maurice Sterne, and Millard Sheets.

Dooley's long teaching career continued, at Scripps College, 1937-1939; the Kern County Schools, Bakersfield, California, 1939-1948; and the College of the Pacific (now University of the Pacific), Stockton, California, 1948-1964, becoming a professor of art. She retired to Carmel, California, where she had been painting for the previous twenty years. She opened the Dooley Art Gallery in 1964, the year of her retirement, running it for nearly thirty years until the year before her death.

The artist, who worked in abstract expressionist, as well as more representational, styles, had one-person shows at the Haggin Museum and Art Gallery, Stockton, in 1962, and the Dooley Gallery, 1990. She also exhibited at the Oakland Art Gallery, CA; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; California State Fair, Sacramento; PAFA; Society of Western Artists, San Francisco; Springville Museum of Art, UT; Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento; Laguna Beach Art Association, CA; AWS; Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art; Royal Watercolor Society, London; and Carmel Art Association.

Her work is in the collections of the University of the Pacific; Shimizu Art Museum, Japan; and Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art.

Helen Dooley died in Carmel, California in January 1994.

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