Don DeLew is a colorful artist in love with life and painting and fascinated by light. His mother taught him drawing before reading, and painting next. While still in Morningside High School in Inglewood, CA, he attended both The Academy of Art in San Francisco and Art Center School in Los Angeles. He worked at GalerieGregg Juarez on La Cienega, drove trucks and tractors for the City of Inglewood, and painted commercial signs before gaining his B.A. at Cal State University Long Beach.
During these late 1960's and early 1970's college years, he helped organize, manage, and show his water colors and acrylic paintings at the Volt, an avant-garde cooperative gallery in Long Beach. His large colorful abstraction of the "Ventura Freeway" was featured in "Temple Street and Long Beach Area Artists" show at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1970. More acrylic canvases and watercolors were shown at a short lived Volt Gallery in Santa Barbara and at Riverbend Gallery in Mendocino before he traveled to paint in England, France, Holland, and Spain. When he returned, he resumed painting in his Long Beach studio and enrolled in the graduate painting program at Cal State Long Beach. During this time period he designed T-Shirts for ColorAmerica of Half Moon Bay for Bob Marley, The Eagles, and for Dan Fogleberg, who also commissioned a 25' x 36' rock venue backdrop for Fogleberg's U.S. tour. After his Master's Thesis Show, called "Dream Impressions" in 1977, he painted other rock backdrops and murals.
The play of light on flowers is a constant delight and he especially enjoys painting "en plein aire" with not only watercolors but also acrylics and canvas. His devotion to palette-knife, brush work, and calligraphy also inspire intimate acrylic abstracts reminiscent of flowing Zen poetry. Communicating through drawing and painting led him into the exciting world of teaching art. His wife Grace, an award-winning educator herself, invited him to teach drawing and painting to her classes in the Westminster School District during the early 1990's.
He taught beginning art classes for the Palos Verdes Art Center youth program in both 1997 and 1998. In 1999 he was invited to join the faculty at Brooks College of Design in Long Beach. There he taught drawing and design principles, presentation skills, and theatrical set painting techniques for the entertainment, hospitality, and restaurant industries. Leaving Brooks in 2004 he resumed more independent showings as well as mural design. The last architectural "trompe l'oeil" mural still exists at the Century 21Action! Real Estate Office on Redondo Ave. in Signal Hill. His paintings are on display and in private collections from Rome west to Taipei.
DeLew and his wonderful wife Grace live in a sunny flat above their studio in the Rose Park District in Long Beach, where flowers and palms continue to inspire them both.
