Watercolor
Description
Emmy Lou Packard, Artist, Teacher And Social Activist” – Allan Temko
Throughout her long career, Ms. Packard upheld the ideal of easily understandable public art. Although she admired some abstract modern art and even bought “elitist” paintings by her friends to adorn the delightful studio homes she created in North Beach, the Mendocino sea-front, and the Mission District, her goal was always to reach out to the people en masse.
Thus, her large murals and, particularly, inexpensive woodblock and linoleum prints — often of multiethnic children and workers — brought her a large following among radicals and conservatives alike. Yet, like her friend and teacher Diego Rivera’s works, her art never succumbed to Stalinist social realism, although she did look to Moscow and later Beijing for many other things. Her hand was too deft, her wit too incisive, for such humorless crudities.
Up until the 1990s, when she taught and encouraged young Latino artists to work on a big scale for the common good, she adhered to the goal of a Marxist popular art. Yet she herself occasionally was close to abstract expressionism, as in the tremendous sand-cast concrete mural that servesTry it!
