"[1] After his death a curator described a dominant aspect of Deshaies' prints, calling them "biomorphic, surrealist fantasies.

Having served in the Army for all of World War II, he enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated in 1948 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

[26] After his appointment as professor of art at Florida State University in 1963, Deshaies was represented by commercial galleries in Tallahassee, Sarasota, and Jacksonville.

[26] In 1987, on the occasion of a solo exhibition of his paintings and mixed-media assemblages on paper, a critic described Deshaies as a man who "hasn't lost his infatuation with hues, textures and deftly wrought abstract compositions.

"[27] After he retired from Florida State University in 1989, Deshaies moved his studio to Duncan, South Carolina, and began to make more acrylic paintings on canvas than he had earlier in his career.

[29][32] Late in life Deshaies told an interviewer that his interest in abstract art dated back to his youth.

Like his contemporaries among the abstract expressionists, Deshaies made exclusively non-geometric designs, mostly having natural objects as their subjects.

"[2] In the early 1950s Deshaies made prints by a technique that he called stencil-offset, which a critic said, used "bright and unequivocal color" with strength and precision to achieve a gracefulness of forms.

[35][36][37] In the mid-1950s Deshaies made wood engravings, retaining much of the gestural abstract style he had adopted for his earlier stencil-offset prints.

A curator described his method: he would place a drawing under the clear sheet as a guide, and work up the matrix using a variety of tools, including an electric router.

"[30] Two years later, describing a set of paintings called the "Universe Series," another critic noted colors that were "transparent, superimposed and incandescent.

[1] Deshaies began his teaching career in 1949 as an instructor at Indiana University where he was enrolled in the graduate program of the School of Fine Arts.

[39] He continued teaching there after receiving his master's degree and also taught during the summer months at the art colony in Ogunquit, Maine.

[4] In 1956 he began teaching at the Pratt Institute and in 1963 joined the faculty at the Florida State University College of Fine Arts.

The family lived in Woonsocket, R.I. where Arthur Oliver Deshaies worked as a shoe repairer in a cobbler shop.

[41] When Deshaies was in his senior year of high school in Burrillville, Carmen, having dropped out after eighth grade, was working as a doffer in a local worsted mill.

He was born in Quebec on June 17, 1904, and was employed as a fireman in the boiler room of the Rhode Island State Sanitarium (Burrillville, R.I.).