Louis Kollmeyer

December 6, 1914 – April 14, 2018

Louis Kollmeyer was a Signature member of the Northwest Watercolor Society. His paintings appeared in 42 invitational and group shows, in over 50 juried exhibits, and 20 one-man shows — including solo exhibitions reported at the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Two of his paintings were included in the Americans in Paris Exhibition in 1976, a Bi-Centennial of contemporary American painting. Earlier, after seeing his work in the Northwest Annual Exhibition in Seattle, the editors of the Paris magazine La Revue Moderne invited him to submit paintings for review. His works are owned by individuals in over a dozen states and in Canada, England, Ireland, and Holland.

A native of the Ozark area of Missouri, Louis's education began in a one-room rural school. He earned his bachelor's degree from Southwest Missouri State Teachers College in 1937 and taught briefly in Mountain Grove, Missouri before beginning graduate study at the University of Iowa, where he worked under Jean Charlot and Horst Janson during Grant Wood's tenure as the university's artist-in-residence. He completed his Master of Arts in 1946 with a studio thesis of ten original watercolors, and later took a Doctorate of Education at the University of Oregon in 1958.

During World War II, Louis was commissioned through the Navy's V-7 Officer Candidate Program at Northwestern University and assigned to USS Card (CVE-11), a Bogue-class escort carrier in the Atlantic. As First Division Officer he stood Officer-of-the-Deck watches while Card's task group hunted German U-boats across the North Atlantic and off North Africa. In November 1943, Task Group 21.14 received a Presidential Unit Citation from Admiral Royal E. Ingersoll for its anti-submarine record. Card was later transferred to the Pacific as an aircraft transport after Germany's surrender; Louis was released from active duty in January 1946.

His work concentrated on the landscape environment, focusing on earth forces and movement, color, and other design elements rather than on literal representation. Among his most distinctive bodies of work is a series of paintings based on prehistoric Indian rock art from the Columbia River region, a subject he returned to repeatedly and which formed the basis of a 2004 solo exhibition, Pictographs and Petroglyphs, at the Clymer Museum of Art.

In his 25 years as chair at Central Washington University, Louis helped shape the art department's physical and academic footprint. Randall Hall — CWU's dedicated arts building — opened under his leadership in 1969, and both the M.A. in Art and, later, the M.F.A. program were authorized during his chairmanship. The Sarah Spurgeon Gallery, named for a colleague he worked alongside for decades, remains central to the department today.

Louis married Verla Faye Shannon in 1938; their partnership spanned more than seven decades. After retiring from CWU in 1983 he continued to paint from his home studio in Ellensburg. Gallery One Visual Arts Center mounted a retrospective of twenty paintings for his 100th birthday in December 2014, and he continued to paint into his 102nd year.

Education

• 1937Bachelor of Education — Southwest Missouri State Teachers College
• 1942Navy V-7 Officer Candidate Program — Northwestern University Midshipmen's School
• 1946Master of Arts — University of Iowa (studio thesis, Ten Original Watercolors)
• 1958Doctorate of Education — University of Oregon

Academic Career

• 1946–1950Art Department Chair — Eastern Oregon College
• 1950–1958Art Department Chair — University of Wisconsin–River Falls
• 1958–1983Art and Industrial Arts Chair — Central Washington University