Rowena Meeks Abdy

She married writer Harry Bennett Abdy. He would promote Abdy's work using his writing skills. In 1915, couple took a steamboat trip from St. Louis, Missouri to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They met artist Armin Hansen, who would make drawings that would eventually be used to create by Abdy.[1][2] The Abdy's finished their trip in New York City, where Abdy exhibited work created during the trip. Harry wrote a book on the trip, On the Ohio, which featured illustrations by Abdy. When they got back to California, Abdy built a home on the Monterey Peninsula. She called her studio and home, Forest Haven. It was there where she would main many Spanish missions and coastal landscapes. She then moved, in 1917, to San Diego, California. In San Diego, she painted landscapes of Old Town. In 1919, she was represented by Helgesen Galleries in San Francisco. The gallery showed her watercolors, charcoal drawings, and landscapes of Mission San Juan Bautista.[2] [6]

Decoration: Wild Geese by Rowena Meeks Abdy, c. 1925

During this period, she took road trips, in her sedan. Her sedan was equipped with special storage spaces for her art supplies. The work from this road trip period would be published in a coffee table book called Old California.[2] The book consisted primarily of watercolors. It was printed by John Henry Nash and it was dedicated to Henry E. Huntington. Gottardo Piazzoni wrote the foreword. The book was limited edition, only 400 copies were made, and copies today are collectors items.[5] Some plates from the book were utilized by the University of California alumni magazine and Standard Oil Monthly.[2]

She lived and worked briefly on Montgomery Street, before moving into her Lombard Street home in 1921.[1][5] In the mid-1920s she started painting still lifes and flowers. In 1926, she exhibited her painting, Old Spanish Street, Monterey, at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. It was the first time American artists exhibited at the museum. That same year, Abdy became a founding member of the cooperative art space, Club Beaux Arts, in San Francisco. She had a solo show there that November, followed by multiple solo and group exhibitions at the space throughout the rest of the decade.[2] During the decade, Abdy and Harry divorced.[5]

In 1927, Abdy created a painting of the Greene and Greene, D. L. James House, once owned by the writer Daniel Lewis James. The painting shows the sandstone and granite Mediterranean-style house on a bluff in Carmel Highlands, California overlooking the water.[7]

In the early 1930s, Abdy stopped using white paint in her watercolors, which she exhibited in March 1931 in San Francisco. When her drawings and paintings from California and Italy were given a solo exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in March 1932, the opinions of critics were divided between H.L. Dungan,[8] who praised her "clean colors and entertaining imagination," and Junius Cravens,[9] who found her compositions "weak in that they lack unity and logic." Abdy joined and exhibited with the Carmel Art Association between 1934 and 1942.[1] She contributed to the art display at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in 1936. Due to declining health she preferred to spend the winters in the desert. Her exhibition of Death Valley scenes at the Legion of Honor in 1942 was praised for its simple and totally un-sensational manner.[1]