“…But what distinguishes a man from a pattern in nature or a plant or an animal? It’s his brain, his mind and his soul, if you want to call it, that you can’t define. And what makes a man should also make his art.”
Alice “Gene” Kloss is without a doubt, one of the American West’s most prolific printmakers. Kloss was born in Oakland, California in 1903, the daughter of a dairy farming father and a mother with a deep appreciation for nature and spending time outdoors. Gene’s aunt, among the first women to graduate from the University of California in the late 1800s, inspired her to also attend the same university and during her senior year there she took her first seminar on etching, a decision that would shape the rest of her life.
After graduating from her fine art program with honors, Gene had just married Phillips Kloss, a poet, composer, and writer, and the two embarked on a honeymoon adventure to Taos, NM. With camping equipment, a printing press, and a bag of cement in-tow (to mount the press on a stump, of course), the couple spent two weeks happily engulfed in the arts and outdoors.
A growing arts community, they quickly fell in love with Taos, and would for years continue the back-and-forth between there and California, where they took care of each of their aging, widowed mothers. Gene and Phillips made Taos their permanent home in 1952.
During her years of creating art, Gene worked in watercolor, oil, and etching. A rare feat for a printmaker, it is estimated that throughout her lifetime, Gene pulled over 18,000 prints herself, without the aid of a studio assistant. Her subjects range from quiet landscapes, to energy-filled renditions of rituals of the Taos Pueblo. She left behind a portfolio of some 600+ different etchings, each telling its own captivating story of life in the southwest.
(1903 – 1996)