Obituaries

Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Stephanie Cash, David Ebony

Eric Orr, 58, painter and sculptor, died Nov, 13 of a heart attack in Venice, Calif. Orr pioneered the Light and Space movement in Southern California in the late '60s and '70s with fellow artists Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Doug Wheeler. Though not formally trained as an artist, Orr was encouraged by members of the art community that he met while working as a welder on Mark di Suvero's Peace Tower in West Hollywood in 1965. Orr's inspiration, however, lay in such natural phenomena as the play of light on flowing water. He often sought to emulate such effects in works using materials like stone, metal, water, fire, dry ice, his own blood and dust from the Great Pyramid. Orr won acclaim in 1980 with his installation Silence and the Ion Wind at the L.A. County Museum, which he re-created in 1996 at Fred Hoffman Fine Art in Santa Monica. Orr showed at various galleries over the years, primarily on the West Coast.

Francisco Sainz, 75, Abstract-Expressionist painter, died Oct. 20 of a heart attack in East Hampton. Sainz immigrated to New York from Spain after World War II. He is known for his colorful canvases depicting figures, often in Spanish dress, against landscape backgrounds. He exhibited with New York's Dorsky Gallery in the '60s, and more recently at the Morgan Rank Gallery in East Hampton.

Margaret Lefranc Schoonover, 91, painter, died Sept. 5 in Santa Fe. Lefranc operated the Guild Art Gallery in New York from 1935 to '39, before moving to New Mexico in 1945. She was included in the 1996 show "Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945" at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe.

Ralph L. Wickiser, 88, artist and educator, died Oct. 27 of cancer. After working at Louisiana State University and SUNY New Paltz, Wickiser took a position at Pratt Institute in 1959 and, in 1962, founded that school's fine arts graduate program. After retiring in 1978, he devoted himself full-time to painting. In 1947, Wickiser published An Introduction to Art Activities, which was widely used by art educators for over 30 years.

Larry Bell, a colleague of Eric Orr's for more than 30 years, wrote the following: "I cannot remember not knowing Eric. He was one of the troopers on my scene, constantly working on one bizarre concept or another, interested in all ideas. He believed in the value and power of boundless misdirected energy. This is the raw stuff that makes art. The imagery of his paintings was a gradient of one color, to him a metaphor of life. A few years back his paintings contained the residue of ground-up radios, or fragments of human bone. The metaphysics of these substances fascinated him. Recently he gained success for sculptures that included basic elements--fire and water. Some of his monolithic forms look like square columns with a graceful and silent sheet of water slipping down each side. The water creates mesmerizing patterns that constantly change as it quietly slips into a bed of small stones at the bottom to be returned to the top. The columns are about silence, continuum and movement. Eric was possessed by a curious certainty of his mission. His work was powerful, pure and consistent to a heroic degree."