OLAF PALM

1935 – 2000

Olaf Palm has woven his passion for painting, family and travel into a life of exceptional harmony and productivity. Palm’s work reflects both the depth and the light of his passions. Palm seems to have always known what he wanted to paint, and very early on he began going about it with the single-minded obedience to his personal vision that has marked every step of his path.

Growing up in California’s North Coast with Finnish immigrant farming parents, he ignored family notions of what a man’s work should be by studying art at San Jose State College. Instead of pursuing the current popular subject of Abstract Impressionism, he followed his own fascination with 17^th Century Dutch Masters: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, and the “Little Masters” of the Utrecht School. Deep response to the classic masters was to take him through decades of solitary, intense work and study. His view was, “I really wanted to know how they did it…the old ones. I wanted to tell my story that way. That’s why I paint”.

Palm returned with his family to rural Northern California in the late ‘60’s. Country life and family demands absorbed him for several years, but his central passion to paint was only dormant. It became his focus again in the mid-70’s, and he launched into the travel and painting that would absorb him from that point on.

Palm travelled his path without concern for the trends and fashions of the art world. He painted his travels, and his life at home, and has reaped the harvest of his lifetime through his own painterly vision. “The hands know how to do it. I no longer have to give any thought to technique. I only have to think about what I want to do in the picture.”

Not too long after his show at the Blue Heron Galley in 2000, Palm lost what had been a multi-year battle with cancer.