Paul Klee

Paul Klee.

When I was a college student at Midland College, a Lutheran school in Fremont, Nebraska in the l950's,  I discovered this Swiss/German artist and studied everything he had created available to me in the art department of Midland's little library.

Klee's poetic and whimsical style really caught my imagination at this formative period in my life.

Heavily influenced by Klee, I drew and painted a lot of small pictures based on Shakespeare and other poetic themes

I wrote to the Paul Klee Stifung in Basel, I think it was,  asking for information about the artist and they, probably hoping I was a rich American, sent me a beautiful color catalog of Klee's work--free.

My artist aunt, Nila Clayton, was working for Disney at the time  helping create the Small World exhibition at Disneyland which was perhaps also influenced by Klee's artistic style though he had died in 1940-- a refugee from Nazi Germany in Switzerland.

Some years later, as an itinerant traveler and artist  in Switzerland, I traded watercolor paintings for room and board at the hotel Grand Vareina in Klosters and visited the art museum in Berne where I saw several of Klee's original paintings

I have been figuratively bumping into Klee on and off all my adult life--"So blau wie schnee, so Paul wie Klee"--in Hesse's "Journey to the East" and so forth-- and  feel in him a kindred spirit--though I am far from being the serious and rather driven intellectual of his Teutonic type.

Here is my portrait of this 20th Century artist:

Paul Klee (1879-1940)

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