Richard Gilkey

Gilkey was born in Bellingham, Washington, on December 20, 1925, and spent his first six years in British Columbia, Canada, where his father worked in the logging industry as a timber cruiser, identifying and marking trees to be cut down.

The family then returned to Washington's Skagit Valley region (where Gilkey's paternal great-grandfather and maternal grandfather had been early residents), living in March Point, a small town near Anacortes.

[1] Gilkey worked a succession of jobs, including sailor, ranch hand, and logger,[1] while at the same time developing both an interest in art and a reputation as a barroom brawler.

[2] A private tour of the Seattle Art Museum offered by assistant director Ed Thomas had a profound effect on him, leaving him particularly moved by the works of Guy Anderson, Morris Graves, and Mark Tobey.

Tobey enmeshed figures, cities and worlds in threaded light and pointed to the unity of energy in all forms and deplored the egocentrism of warring nations.

In 1948 a $1,000 inheritance from his grandmother allowed him to spend four months touring the great museums of Europe; he was especially impressed by the works of Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, and Vincent van Gogh.

Returning to Seattle, he spent the next few years developing his painting style while living in a small apartment with fellow painter Leo Kenney.

Unmoved by Abstract Expressionism and the emerging Pop Art of the 1960s, he began making regular painting trips to the Skagit Valley, primarily working outdoors.

[6] Although he now avoided barroom brawling, Gilkey remained a temperamental figure, well known for his disputes with gallery owners, curators, and critics, and for his dislike of the 'gallery system'.

Two years after that, his new works, representing his explorations of the nature of consciousness, were shown at Janet Huston's newly opened gallery in the Skagit Valley, and were greeted with critical acclaim, good sales, and an award from the Governor of the State of Washington.

Some time before noon on Friday, October 3, 1997,[4] he parked his pickup truck on the side of a dirt road near the summit of 9,600-foot Togwotee Pass in the Grand Tetons, and fatally shot himself.