California From 1917 through 1920, Dulah (traveling with Albert, Evans, and her sister, journalist and playwright Mayetta Evans) spent summers painting in
California at the
Santa Monica Art colony. Dulah's friend and fellow Tree Studio artist, Julia Bracken, had married painter
William Wendt in 1906 and moved to
Los Angeles, becoming one of the city's foremost sculptors. By 1918, William Wendt had built a studio at
Laguna Beach and
California Impressionism was in full swing. Dulah's many paintings of her son and sister posing along the beach reflected this style. One such work,
Santa Monica Bay (1920, 17" x 21", oil on canvas), was exhibited at the
Arts Club of Chicago in 1923, where Dulah was a founding member. Dulah would return to Santa Monica many times, often after having spent the initial summer months at the
Art colony of Santa Fe in
New Mexico, which was started by
Alice Corbin Henderson, editor of the magazine
Poetry, and wife of Indian motif painter
William Penhallow Henderson. In 1927, Dulah visited fellow artist
Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt at his studio in Santa Fe, where she and her sister bought ten of his paintings. On this trip, Dulah took photographs of the studios of several Taos artists, including those of
Ernest Blumenschein, painter and one of the founders of the
Taos Society of Artists, and painter
Gerald Cassidy, as well as photographs of the home of
Mabel Dodge Luhan. (A wealthy heiress from New York, Mabel Dodge Luhan transformed
Taos, New Mexico, into an
artist colony in the 1920s and 30s by inviting such noted artists as
Georgia O'Keeffe and
D. H. Lawrence to join her in the town's idyllic setting, which she considered to be the center for cultural and spiritual salvation.) It was in California that Dulah began painting in the
modernist style. She created works that were more introspective in nature and which had spiritual overtones. Dulah became interested in the organization of multiple figures, often using groupings of three (perhaps to reveal a spiritual synthesis) in
surrealistic mountain landscapes. She produced different tensions with each canvas by the placement of subject figures in positions juxtaposed to their rocky surroundings. One such work,
Mountain Pass (September 1920, 23" x 24", oil on canvas), was exhibited at the Chicago Arts Club in 1927. Dulah created her first etchings relating to the Southwest in 1927. Her Southwest prints were sold in the Albert Roullier Galleries in Chicago and were often featured in Chicago newspapers and magazines. In 1930, Dulah left Park Ridge for New York City, where she was successful in establishing a market for her artwork at the
Salons of America and the
Society of Independent Artists.
Studio Place Returning to her Park Ridge home and her studio (now called "Studio Place") in 1932, Dulah persevered in creating her ethereal landscapes throughout the decade and beyond. From the early 1920s through the 1940s, she exhibited at the
Arts Club of Chicago with other well-known artists, including painter Pauline Palmer and
Bauhaus photographer
László Moholy-Nagy, and at The Art Institute of Chicago with painters
Gerald Cassidy,
Jessie Willcox Smith,
Edgar Payne, and
J. Alden Weir. As if to reflect the diversity of her art, throughout her career Dulah signed her works as Dulah Marie Evans, Dulah Llan Evans, and as Dulah Evans Krehbiel. The Park Ridge Modernist, as Dulah had become known, died at the age of 76 on July 24, 1951, in
Evanston, Illinois. Dulah's impressionistic work,
Three Ladies at an Open Window (August 1920, 14" x 17", oil on canvas) was selected in 2001 for the permanent collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. ==Museum collections==