Rowena Meeks Abdy

Rowena Fischer Meeks Abdy (April 24, 1887 – August 18, 1945) was an American modernist painter. She primarily painted landscapes and worked in Northern California.

Early life and education

She was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1887 to American parents, John and Anna Meeks, who compensated for Rowena's deformed leg by encouraging her natural talent in art. After prolonged stays in Vienna, Dresden, Paris, and London the family moved to San Francisco, California, in the 1890s.

For the academic year 1904-05 Abdy studied under the tonalist painters Arthur Frank Mathews, Charles C. Judson, and Will Sparks at the California School of Design in the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, where she was awarded an honorable mention for drawing. Her street scenes and landscapes in oils, watercolors and mixed-media drawings appeared in over fifty exhibitions throughout California from 1908 to the mid-1940s. Abdy had a large "KEEP OUT" sign on her garden, which was frequented by uninvited curious tourists. From her studio, Abdy could see Marin County, Contra Costa County and the San Francisco Bay.

1920s

During this period, she took road trips, in her sedan. Her sedan was equipped with special storage spaces for her art supplies. The work from this road trip period would be published in a coffee table book called Old California.

1930s and 1940s

In the early 1930s, Abdy stopped using white paint in her watercolors, which she exhibited in March 1931 in San Francisco. When her drawings and paintings from California and Italy were given a solo exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in March 1932, the opinions of critics were divided between H.L. Dungan, who praised her "clean colors and entertaining imagination," and Junius Cravens, who found her compositions "weak in that they lack unity and logic." Abdy joined and exhibited with the Carmel Art Association between 1934 and 1942.

Major collections Ravello, date unknown, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington View of an Italian Hill Town, ca. 1920, Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, California Decoration: Wild Geese, ca. 1925, Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, California The Robert Louis Stevenson House in Monterey, 1928, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, California