Ben Norris: Inspired Artist

When American modernist painter Ben Norris began to write his memoir in 1998 at age 88, he relied not only on his own diaries and daybooks, but also happily upon his daughter Maggie Castrey, who edited the book ‘Ben Norris: American Modernist, 1910-2006,’ and his niece Bridget Norris, the family archivist, who provided many of the book’s black-and-white photographs. The name ‘Norris’ rings a bell here in Pacific Palisades, for Ben was the oldest son of Clarissa and Robert Norris, who in 1923 relocated from Hollywood to the start-up community of Pacific Palisades, encouraged by Clarissa’s older brother, Rev. Charles Scott, president of the founding association. Robert established a plumbing shop on the corner of Temescal Canyon Road and Beverly Boulevard (now Sunset) to supply essentials for the growing community. The shop later became Norris Hardware, now located adjacent to Ralphs, near the corner of Sunset and La Cruz, which was operated for many years by Chuck Norris, the youngest of Robert Norris’s five children. While Ben Norris went on to enjoy a long life living all over the world’Hawaii, Japan, New York City’his book provides fond, detailed reminiscences of his teenage years here, from 1923 to 1927. His father built a Southern California Spanish-style house at 1134 Kagawa St., while his uncle, Charles Scott, built ‘a grand house’ on Via de la Paz. Vera Norris, Chuck’s widow, recalls the Kagawa house: ‘They had two big lots. Mr. Norris was a gardener and grew vegetables and trees. I miss that very much.’ As with all Palisades children in the early days, Ben attended school outside the community. ‘The Palisades was technically a part of the city of Los Angeles, but no suitable Los Angeles schools were yet available near enough, so in the eighth grade, I entered Lincoln Junior High School in Santa Monica,’ he writes. Ben chronicles an early interest in music and drama in ‘Ben Norris: American Modernist,’ and thrived in the creative environment here. The Methodist Church also occupied his time: he played in the Sunday school orchestra as second chair first violin, attended church service with the adults and Epworth League activities for young people, and ‘tried hard to be good.’ Later in life, Norris explained that he was ‘no longer in the lingering grasp of the notion of original sin,’ and became a Quaker. Norris’s interest in the natural world and his inclination to observe it carefully began while he was at University High. He got a job at a nursery in his senior year, which he ‘found thoroughly interesting, opening packages of seeds from far-off places’I remember the first time I encountered ‘Frangipani’ in a packet sent from Tahiti. Later, in Hawaii, I came to recognize in the plumeria, the common tourists’ lei flower, the name that prompted a tropical reverie in my youth.’ He also was elected editor-in-chief of the senior yearbook, ‘a big, elaborately produced hardcover volume with hand-colored section pages. We designed all the artwork ourselves, then organized teams to do the coloring before sending the plates to be bound in by the printers.’ Norris, who was 13 years older than Chuck, left for Pomona College in 1927, where his interest in art flourished and prompted a hunger to study further and to immerse himself in the study of the great Western art masterpieces. He used the college’s Honnold Fellowship and its stipend (‘a princely $1,500’) to travel to Harvard, where he began graduate studies in art history. Stimulated, challenged and enjoying talking about ‘everything in the world’ with new friends, Norris nevertheless was called back to his ‘half-dead desire to paint, to make something.’ Restrained by the Depression, the Honnold committee renewed his grant for a reduced $700, to which Norris added $300 from the Institute of International Education and departed for Europe, where he allowed himself more time to study what he wanted and experience ‘The Grand Tour’ American style. Norris hardly traveled in a lordly fashion, mostly spending his days with sketchbook and watercolors while making his way from France to Spain to Italy, visiting both the great museums and tiny towns, where he ‘learned how to identify the room above the bar that could be rented for a night.’ The aspiring artist gravitated to architectural renderings and learned to look at things as an artist, not as a historical student.   By the time he returned to the United States in the summer of 1933, Norris had amassed a cache of watercolors and drawings, which became the subject of several one-man shows’including one in Claremont. He moved back to Pacific Palisades for a time until he found work, first teaching in a school on Westmoreland, later at an animation studio. Times were tough and jobs paid meager wages, but Norris was free to do and go anywhere. The next decision in his life, really more practical than passionate, set his course for the next 40 years. He sailed for Hawaii on the SS Lurline in September 1936 to take a job as housefather and art teacher at the Kamehameha School for Boys. Always seeking out the art community, Norris was offered a major showing at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, which obviously included mostly California paintings, with a few new Hawaiian landscapes. ‘I found a studio in what had once been part of the kitchen of the former Royal Hawaiian Hotel downtown, before the Pink Palace on the beach at Waikiki,’ Norris writes. He also joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii and became the lone full-time instructor. In 1940, Norris married Peggy Sheffield, whom he had met through a mutual friend. They rented a small house in the rain forest on Mount Tantalus and started a family. The war began abruptly on Sunday morning as the couple listened to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on the radio.   ’We heard some gunfire that sounded like target practice out at sea, and wondered at the Navy being that industrious on a Sunday. A voice came over the radio, ‘The Islands are under enemy attack! Leave your radio on for announcements and instructions. The station will now go off the air.’   ’We quickly walked through the woods to a lookout where we could see through the trees. There were planes in the sky, and my wife said, aghast, ‘They’re not ours!’ We saw the smoke pouring up from the sunken ships, and scattered bursts of erratic antiaircraft fire.’   The war closed the university and thrust the island into quarantine with attendant curfew and deprivations. Norris found work with the government designing camouflage for military installations and later working for the U.S. Geological Survey.   For the decade following the war, Norris was primarily engaged in his teaching and administrative duties in the art department at the university and doing his best to be a good husband and father, all of this ‘leaving little time for my own painting expeditions.’ Yet, as he matured as an artist, he found more and more interest in challenging the media, and employed lessons he learned from others. He invited a number of well-known artists to Hawaii to participate in the visiting-scholar program he set up at the university. These included Max Ernst, Josef Albers and Jean Charlot. ‘Thanks to what I learned from these distinguished guest artists, I was able to move more confidently toward abstraction and breaking up the picture plane,’ Norris writes. ‘What was exceptional about my dad was the tremendous variety of styles and media he pursued over his career,’ Maggie says. ‘He never painted for the market. If he had settled into seascapes, we would all have been living in mansions.’   Norris’s memoir focuses a great deal on his painting and is unusually descriptive in explaining his process while being comprehensible to the reader.   No doubt, his daughter Maggie was helpful in assisting in arranging and editing the material. She and her brothers, Stephen and Peter, enjoyed a blissfully free childhood where the only rule was ‘Do not accept a ride from a stranger.’ After she graduated from high school in 1964, Maggie went on to Pomona, her father’s alma mater. ‘We had a trusting relationship,’ she says. ‘He respected and appreciated my abilities as writer and editor, and I was the member of the family most involved with him as an artist. Dad loved to talk about his work, and himself. After all, he was a lifetime career lecturer and teacher. He was erudite and articulate.’ Norris eventually left Hawaii and ‘retired’ in New York a month after his 66th birthday. He and Peggy had divorced, his children were launched and he wanted to ‘measure myself as an artist in the ‘capital’ of the Art World.’ While he continued to make art and show in galleries, he also began to come to terms with himself as an artist and intellect. ‘My inner need to be recognized has diminished,’ he writes in the final chapter of this book, at age 92. ‘I have had enough acknowledgment of my work to be able to move away from strong wishes for others’ approval to more confidence in my own acceptance of my art as good.’ Ben Norris continued to paint until he was 90, Maggie says. ‘Up until 92, he would call me every week and I would go and visit him often.’ (‘Ben Norris: American Modernist 1910-2006,’ Copley Square Press, $55, is available at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore Ave.)