William Ivey

William Ivey (September 30, 1919 – May 17, 1992) was an American abstract expressionist painter, sometimes associated with the Northwest School of artists. After stints in the US Army and studying art in California, he spent most of his career in Seattle, Washington. Seattle Times critic Deloris Tarzan Ament described him as "the Dean of Northwest Painters".

His studies were interrupted by the Second World War. Ivey went into the Army, trained as a commando in the First Special Service Force, and served in the Aleutians, Africa, Italy, and France. In later years he seldom spoke of his wartime experiences, but was known to have sustained a serious abdominal wound. While in Italy he was able to view works by Giotto, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio. After the war Ivey spent three years at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco, where he undertook serious study of modern art with such influential instructors as Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, David Park, and Clay Spohn. Friends and fellow students included noted painters Richard Diebenkorn and Frank Lobdell.

While Ivey was gaining recognition, and was able to quit his day job, he was notorious for his reluctance to attend opening parties, do publicity, or seek out commissions, and for his gruff, workmanlike approach to painting. "Painting is something you have to do all the time," he told arts journalist Regina Hackett in a 1992 interview. "If you don't, it becomes too important, too charged with meaning, and you can't bring yourself to do it. For me, it's like tying my shoes in a way." Green Forest, 1981, William Ivey. Collection of Woodside/Braseth Gallery. Ivey also generally disliked teaching, but taught for short periods at the San Francisco Art Institute, Reed College, and Highline Community College, and also gave private lessons for small groups at a studio he shared with painter Frank Okada in downtown Seattle. in 1983 he was named Artist of the Year by the King County (Washington) Arts Commission, and used the $25,000 reward to build a studio behind his home in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood;

Ivey was acquainted with Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and other members of the 'Northwest School', and was close friends with Richard Gilkey and many of the Skagit Valley-based painters who were considered by some critics to represent a second generation of the Northwest School. However, his deeply personal style of abstraction showed more of the influence of Still, Rothko, and others he studied under at the California School of Fine Arts. He found inspiration in observation of the real world, but his intense immersion in the painting process transformed what he saw into lush abstractions that emphasized color and the picture plane. In Ivey's paintings, shapes are secondary to color in the development of spaces, and delicate neutral grays set off glowing patches of bright color.

In a 2014 review of a show at the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, arts journalist Matthew Kangas speculated that Ivey's wartime experiences may have had a strong impact on his art, and suggested that "[perhaps] Ivey channeled — or suppressed — such horrors into modernist abstraction in order to control and tame them."

Ivey rarely titled his paintings. He was an avid fly fisherman, often fishing with his friend and fellow painter Carl Morris.

He died in Seattle on May 17, 1992, aged 72, after a year-and-a-half long battle with cancer. He was survived by his wife Helen, daughter Kathleen, and two grandchildren.

Said journalist Hackett, "Ivey was a rough-hewn yet lyrical painter interested in feeling, not fact. Within the frame of a canvas, he painted a frame with colors pouring out. He wanted to capture the visual pulse of a scene without bogging it down in particulars. [...] He wanted to chip the barnacle of language off purely visual sensations. By blurring them, he hoped to restore them to some kind of original fresh sight. Thus, for all his disclaimers and tough-guy fortitude, he was a romantic to his bones."