Dorothy Stratton King

Dorothy Stratton King
Birth name	Dorothy Stratton King
Born	1909 Worcester, MA
Died	June 14, 2007(2007-06-14) (aged 98) Arlington, VA
Nationality	USA
Field	Intaglio (printmaking), painting
Website	dorothystrattonking.com

Dorothy Stratton King (1909 in Worcester, MA- June 14, 2007, Arlington, VA) was an American painter and printmaker. She was a founding member of the Washington Printmakers Gallery in Washington, DC.

Statton King's intaglio prints and paintings have graced the halls of the World Bank, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Russia, Long Beach Museum of Art and US Embassies through the Arts in Embassies Program. Her works are included in numerous private collections in the US and abroad as well as the Georgetown University Fine Print Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington.

Early life

Born in Worcester, MA, she grew up in Sharon, MA, and showed talent as a young child. At age three she drew whenever she had a chance. "The first thing she did as a child (was) draw," said her daughter. "It was obvious she was attracted to it."

She married in 1928 and moved to Brooklyn, NY, and studied figure drawing and painting at the Pratt Institute and took classes at the Brooklyn Museum School, painting with artist Alexander Brook.

She moved to Connecticut to live with her parents in 1942. She helped her father deliver telegrams to families of soldiers killed in World War II.

During the 1960s she lived in La Jolla, CA and acted as registrar for the La Jolla Museum School. An increasing interest in printmaking led to classes at the University of California at San Diego under the tutelage of Paul Lingren.

In the early 1980s, she and her husband moved to McLean, VA. She helped found the Washington Printmakers Gallery in 1985 and became a founding member of the Columbia Pike Artist Studios in Arlington, VA. She was also a member of the Washington Print Club and the Artists Equity Association.

In 1944 she divorced from her husband Michael Hicks-Beach and she moved to Los Angeles where her first job was painting "Tom and Jerry" cartoon cells at Warner Brothers. She then worked in Hollywood, designing costumes and sets for George Pal's Puppetoons.

While in Hollywood, she met the director of animation, William Asbury King. They married in 1948 and spent a year and a half in Paris, where King studied painting with André Lhote at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

She died on June 14, 2007, in Arlington, VA.

Career

Upon returning to Los Angeles, her vivid abstract expressionist paintings gained attention. She studied at the University of California at Los Angeles and had her first major one-woman show at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1959.

A reviewer for the Washington Post once noted, upon viewing her work in a 1992 exhibit, "But over the years she has wrought her own special, rather brooding and gestural style on them to come up with something that is unmistakably hers," wrote Michael Welzenbach. "At her best, Stratton's pictures convey a great deal of movement; a sense of sprawling from the center with suppressed energy."^{[citation needed]}

References

• Askart
• Official website

Persondata
Name	King, Dorothy Stratton
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1909
Place of birth	Worcester, MA
Date of death	June 14, 2007
Place of death	Arlington, VA