Helen Dooley
(1907-1994)

Landscape painter Helen Bertha Dooley was born in San Jose, California, on July 27, 1907 and grew up there. Dooley graduated in 1928, from San Jose State College (now San Jose State University). She taught in the Oakland Secondary Schools, from 1928-1930, later working for the San Jose Department of Adult Education from 1933 to 1937. She also continued her art studies, in 1932, at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco; in 1935, at the Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles (while working for the Department of Adult Education); and ultimately, in 1948, at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City. Dooley's long teaching career continued, at Scripps College, 1937-1939; the Kern County Schools, Bakersfield, California, 1939-1948; and the College of the Pacific (now University of the Pacific), Stockton, California, 1948-1964, becoming a professor of art. Dooley won many awards in California in the 1930’s. She retired to Carmel, California, where she had been painting for the previous twenty years. She opened the Dooley Art Gallery in 1964, the year of her retirement, running it for nearly thirty years until the year before her death. 

She painted landscapes of the Monterey Peninsula, the country around San Jose and Stockton, California and occasionally the desert.  Between 1952 and 1957, the years of her marriage to Wesley Hodgins, she painted the people and landscape of the Hualapai Indian reservation in northwestern Arizona, at Peach Springs, where her husband taught. In 1959, she painted the lives and ceremonials of the Indians in  Taos, New Mexico. 

The artist, equally facile in oil, watercolor, and acrylic, produced brightly colored paintings as an abstract expressionist, as well as more representational, styles. She had one-person shows at the Haggin Museum and Art Gallery, Stockton, in 1962, and the Dooley Gallery, 1990. She also exhibited at the Oakland Art Gallery, CA; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; California State Fair, Sacramento; PAFA; Society of Western Artists, San Francisco; Springville Museum of Art, UT; Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento; Laguna Beach Art Association, CA; AWS; Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art; Royal Watercolor Society, London; and Carmel Art Association.