Obituaries

Eric Orr, 58 painter and sculptor, died Nov, 13 of a heart attack in Venice, Calif. Orr pioneered the Light and Space motion in Southern California in the late '60 and '70 with comrade artists Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Doug Wheeler. granting not formally trained as an artist, Orr was encouraged by dint of members of the art community that he met while working as a welder upon Mark di Suvero's Peace Tower in West Hollywood in 1965 Orr's inspiration, however, lay in of that kind natural phenomena as the play of light upon flowing water. He often sought to emulate like effects in works using materials like stone, metal, water, fire, dried ice, his own blood and dust from the Great Pyramid. Orr won acclaim in 1980 with his installation Silence and the Ion Wind at the L.A. shire Museum, which he re-created in 1996 at Fr Hoffman Fine Art in Santa Monica. Orr showed at various galleries above the years, primarily on the West Coast.

Francisco Sainz, 75 Abstract-Expressionist painter, died Oct 20 of a heart attack in East Hampton. Sainz immigrated to novel York from Spain after World War II. He is known for his colorful canvases depicting figures, oftentimes in Spanish dress, against landscape backgrounds. He exhibited with fresh York's Dorsky Gallery in the '60 and more lately at the Morgan Rank Gallery in East Hampton.

Margaret Lefranc Schoonover, 91 painter, died clan 5 in Santa Fe. Lefranc operated the Guild Art Gallery in of recent origin York from 1935 to '39 before moving to fresh Mexico in 1945. She was included in the 1996 exhibit "Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe

Ralph L Wickiser, 88 artist and educator, died Oct 27 of cancer. After working at Louisiana State University and SUNY novel Paltz, Wickiser took a position at Pratt Institute in 1959 and, in 1962 seted that school's fine arts graduate program. After retiring in 1978 he devot himself full-time to painting. In 1947 Wickiser published An Introduction to Art Activities, which was widely used through art educators for over 30 years.

Larry Bell, a colleague of Eric Orr's for more than 30 years, wrote the following: "I cannot remember not knowing Eric. He was individual of the troopers on my exhibition constantly working on one bizarre general [i]or[/i] abstract notion or another, interested in all ideas. He believed in the value and power of boundles misdirected potency This is the raw material that makes art. The imagery of his paintings was a gradient of individual color, to him a metaphor of life. A small in number years back his paintings contained the residue of ground-up radios, or fragments of human bone The metaphysics of these substances fascinated him. not long ago he gained success for statuarys that included basic elements--fire and water. a certain quantity of of his monolithic forms gaze like square columns with a graceful and silent sheet of water slipping down each side. The water creates mesmerizing patterns that constantly change as it quietly slips into a bed of small stones at the bottom to be get backed to the top. The rounded pillars are about silence, continuum and motion Eric was possessed by a curious certainty of his mission. His work was powerful, unstained and consistent to a heroic degree"

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