Henry Villierme Highway Study No. 2 oil on canvas 77 x 59 1/2 inches 1957 Henry Villierme Highway Study No. 1 oil on canvas 15 1/2 x 14 3/4 inches 1957 'A Vigorous Artist of Obvious Talent' In a conversation in July 2004, curator Paul Mills recalled Henry Villierme's paintings from the pivotal 1957 exhibition of figurative paintings at the Oakland Museum, which Mills organized. And he offered praise for Villierme's later work after he resumed his painting career. "He's a superior talent," Mills said. "He got a good start. Then there was that long period in between. Now he's gone back and started over again." "The quality of the work itself is what's most important," Mills said. "It's not just a souvenir of the '50s. He's not an interloper who's just arrived. He was there." Villierme's Highway Study No. 2 was one of three Villierme paintings Mills included in the 1957 show. It was later misattributed to Richard Diebenkorn. Mills recalled the painting well. "I remember his work in the '57 show," Mills said. "That painting was very large and bold and blank and simple. It was very difficult to hang. I remember exactly where it hung and the difficulties it created in coping with this difference in scale." In the catalog of the 1957 exhibition at the Oakland Museum -- "the only catalog I ever did that got reprinted," he said -- Mills wrote of Villierme: Henry Villierme is a relative newcomer to painting, having begun only three years ago. He was born in San Francisco in 1928 and spent his boyhood in Tahiti and the islands, returning in 1939 to the United States. He drove a truck in the army and spent a great deal of time in Japan. He says he was excited by the look of Japan, even the smell of it, and the way in which the concern for art values was a part of the Japanese people's way of life. Prior to his army experiences in Japan, Villierme says he had begun to become interested in art through mixing paints in a paint store and working out interior color schemes. With a chance to go to college on the G.I. Bill, Villierme decided he wanted to pursue this interest in art and he enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts. He studied with the great Japanese abstractionist and abstract calligrapher, Sabro Hasegawa, as well as with Diebenkorn and Bischoff. His work has always been realistic in the same way it is now, though he used to work on smaller canvases and to paint, he says, with a pointillist and cubist kind of approach. An award was given to him in the Jack London Square Art Festival this summer and he has begun to exhibit locally and elsewhere. Great rolling landscapes of large size are his most frequent subjects at the present time, though he also does figure paintings and uses small, one foot square canvases occasionally. He generally works from sketches which he makes on the spot, but he lets these sketches sit for a month or so before he paints from them. He is drawn on the one hand to painters like Bonnard, yet has a great deal of enthusiasm for German Expressionist painting and for the work of such artists as Munch. He has not been painting long enough to say of him that he has completely freed himself from the example of his teachers, yet he is a vigorous artist of obvious talent who can advance rapidly. In my discussions with him, I found he sensed as I did that one of the sources of excitement in figurative painting today was in creating paintings which came perilously close to seeming like older styles of figurative painting and yet managed to be completely different and new. Review: Los Angeles Times More about Paul Mills Home