This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  ARTISTS' STATEMENT
"Both my ethnic and cultural backgrounds serve as root sources of my work. The awareness and acceptance of humankind-universal, flowing life's awesome rhythms with dignity in pain, joy, poverty, and often jubilation-cause me to paint. My primary need is to show my gut reaction to man's coping with the cycles of life and death. The aesthetic results of attempting to communicate these universal concepts is to me almost coincidental."
Born and raised in New Orleans where his father was a jazz musician, William Pajaud has created work that spans more than fifty years and covers such diverse topics as traditional New Orleans Jazz Funerals, Negro Spirituals, landscapes of Thailand, and the Old Testament. He currently resides in Los Angeles. Many of his paintings are contemporary figurative in style with emphasis on design and are done with both oil and watercolor. Wet into wet transparent watercolor is a specialty.
Pajaud studied at Xavier University in New Orleans, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree and exhibiting at art exhibitions of black artists. He then spent time in Chicago and in 1948 arrived in Los Angeles where he enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute.
Exhibition venues include the National Watercolor Society, California Watercolor Society, Carnegie Institute, De Young Museum, Crocker Gallery, Atlanta University, and the Butler Art Institute. His work is in the collections of the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, Las Vegas Museum of Art, Norton Simon Museum in Los Angeles, Pushkin Museum in Leningrad, National Museum of American Art in Washington DC at the Smithsonian Institute, and the private collections of Camille O and William H. Cosby, Jr., Bishop Desmond Tutu, Charles T. Coiner, and John and Hazel Biggers.
PERIODICAL REFERENCES
"The Life and Art of William Pajaud", Paul Van Blum, AMERICAN VISIONS, Dec. 1995
"William Pajaud", Mae Tate, BLACK ART QUARTERLY INTERNATIONAL, Vol. 4, #5
"A Song for his Father: William Pajaud and the Jazz Funeral Tradition", INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART, Vol. 17, #2
Source:
Stephanie Reeves, Old Hat Auctions, Houston, Texas
"Who's Who in American Art", 1976
Gordon T. McClelland and Jay T. Last, "California Watercolors, 1850-1970" |
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