Tuolumne
County
Biographies
CHARLES SURENDORF
Charles Surendorf, artist, was born in Richmond, Indiana, on November 9, 1906; the son of Charles and Mary Jane (Hurley) Surendorf.
He was a student at the Chicago Art Institute League, 1924-26, Art Student’s League, New York, in 1927, and Ohio State University in 1928.
Mr. Surendorf moved to Logansport, Indiana, in 1929 and opened a studio. Received two prizes in the same year for oil painting and has won numerous awards since on water colors and oils. He is internationally known as a printmaker and has had his engravings accepted in all important national and international graphic shows and prints displayed in the Metropolitan, Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, Corcoran and Philadelphia Museums. The De Young Museum in San Francisco and the California State Library each own a collection of fifty Surendorf wood and linoleum engravings. Also represented in other galleries, museums and private collections as well as in The Library of Congress.
In 1935 he moved to California and had a studio in San Francisco; then moved to Columbia, California, in 1946. He conducts classes in painting and printmaking and taught one year in California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland; worked in Tahiti, New Orleans, California desert, San Francisco, Indiana, and the Mother Lode country. Received 47 awards for prints and paintings; director of Mother Lode Summer Art School, Columbia, California; instructor at California College of Arts and Crafts; established and is director of the Mother Lode Art Gallery; and illustrator of “Mr. Pinney” (juvenile), 1945.
Member of Bay Area Artists Group; director of San Francisco Municipal Art Shows; chairman of San Francisco Committee for Municipal Art; member of Indiana Society of Printmakers, San Francisco Art Association, California Society of Etchers (secretary), Northwest Printmakers Society, Richmond Art Association, and New Orleans Art Association. He directed the first outdoor art show sponsored by the San Francisco Art Commission for the City of San Francisco, in 1946. Also organized the first outdoor art show in Washington, D.C., in 1932. Both shows are now annual events. His work is in Maxwell Galleries and often displayed at the City of Paris, and Gumps, in San Francisco.
Mr. Surendorf married Natalia Paine (divorced); one daughter, Tamara Karla. His second marriage was to Barbara Stoner who was formerly assistant curator of the City of Paris Art Gallery in San Francisco. They have children.
Home: Yankee Hill Road, Columbia, California.
Address: Mother Lode Art School, Columbia, California.
Transcribed by Joyce Rugeroni.
Source: Eminent
Californians 1953, by Lee E. Johnson & C. W. Taylor. Pages 337-338, C. W. Taylor
Publ., Palo Alto, California, 1953.
© 2014 Joyce Rugeroni.