Untitled landscape

William Paul Morehouse

By the late 1980s, bicoastal artist William Paul (Bill) Morehouse had settled in Sonoma County, California, where he had a studio in Bodega Bay. Much of his work from this time reflects a deep appreciation for the seasonal changes of the Northern California coastal prairie, as seen in this image of a golden-hued precipice overlooking a copse of redwoods, a familiar sight along the arterial roads connecting to Highway 1 which runs parallel to the Pacific Ocean.

A small sliver of blue sky in the far distance belies what had been a bright summer day, now overtaken by the formidable shroud of northern California fog. The viewer might be able to imagine the smell of dusty, sunwarmed grasses, mingling with the cool onshore fog whose billowing form carries the blue-green scent of the sea.

California Post-War artist William Paul Morehouse was born in San Francisco on May 27,1929 and divided much of his career between studios in Bodega Bay, California, and Manhattan. In his early formal education he was a teaching assistant to Clyfford Still at the California School of Fine Arts. Along with several classmates, he cofounded the Metart Galleries in the late 1940s, considered among the first of San Francisco's alternative art spaces.

Not long after graduation from the CSFA he joined the Army during the Korean War. He became a Master Sergeant and was released with a Purple Heart in 1953, at which point he enrolled in courses at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts). A transfer to the San Francisco Art Institute the following year led to his Bachelors in Fine Arts, and in 1954 he enrolled at San Francisco State University where in under two years he earned his MFA. He traveled to New York that same year to participate in the Young American Painters exhibition at the Guggenheim, along with Diebenkorn, deKooning, Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. He soon began dividing his time between the two coasts.

Morehouse eventually settled in Bodega Bay permanently, where he continued to paint with Bill Wheeler, Tony King, and Jack Stuppin as part of the group called the "Sonoma Four" until very near his death on November 4 of 1993.