The madams of the Sacred Heart knew right away whom to blame for turning the paintings in the Catholic high school lounge upside down: Inez Storer, the rebellious girl with anarchic inclinations.
Decades later, Ms. Storer’s own paintings are hanging right-side up in the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in Manhattan. The show opened on May 30 and runs through July 19.
For Ms. Storer, the show is a capstone to a distinguished career as an art teacher, a gallery operator and a painter whose works have been widely displayed in the Bay Area and beyond but had yet to be presented at a solo show in the Big Apple.
“It’s pretty terrific,” said Ms. Storer, who lives in Inverness and has worked for nearly 40 years at a paint-splattered studio in Point Reyes Station.
“There are a million artists, and this is a major gallery. To get this chance, you have to wait until you are 100 years old.”
Or, in Ms. Storer’s case, until she was 90.
The nuns at her high school would be proud, if a tad surprised, at the successful path forged by their rebellious charge.
These days, Ms. Storer dabs bright polka dots on her sneakers, which would never meet the strictures of the Marymount dress code.
“They said I had a bad attitude and that I was anti-Papist,” Ms. Storer recalled. “I didn’t know what the hell that meant.”
In the end, her parochial school years were just one more source of material for her work.
“I love to tell stories and I use them as fuel for my art,” she says. “I’m a story painter.”
Not your average nonagenarian, she has lots of stories to tell.
Ms. Storer grew up in Pacific Palisades, home to many Hollywood types, and her father worked as an art director for Paramount. He took her to the studio often, and her classmates, some of whom she enlisted to help turn the paintings upside down, were Hollywood kids.
“The actresses fascinated me, and the artifice they used,” she recalled. “I remember distinctly a film he was doing with either Elizabeth Taylor or a French actress, I think maybe Corinne Colvert. When they finished the scene and yelled cut, she pulled these pads out of her boobs and threw them across the room. It was fabulous.”
Hollywood figures are among the many characters that populate her paintings, collages and mixed-media works, painted in a style all her own, but with echoes of Chagall and Matisse. Greta Garbo makes an appearance. Superman and Superwoman have frequent cameos.
Symbols, artifacts and words are scattered about her canvasses, which typically include a fragment of something she might have collected at an antique store or a flea market—personal letters, family photos, swatches of fabric—whatever captures her eye or imagination.
There are layers of texture and color, much of it bold. Her themes are sometimes dark, sometimes not, often personal, often political. They are leavened with humor and a sense that humans can prevail over the obstacles strewn in their path.
“She dares to be amusing and funny, but underneath it’s serious,” said Marian Parmenter, a lifelong friend and co-founder of the S.F. MOMA Artists Gallery. “I love her individual way of looking at art. It doesn’t look like anybody else’s, and it’s always very fresh and immediate.”
Ms. Storer has described her work as magical realism, mixing the line between fantasy and reality in the same fashion as her favorite author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
A piece titled “Dance Lessons” features the disembodied head of a man wearing a see-through, purple-tinged, polka-dotted bowler. Toward the center of the frame, a woman dances in red high-heels, on her head an American-flag top hat with a bald eagle flapping its wings. She looks spirited. He looks lost in space. Is he looking at her? Past her? Will they connect?
The text floats on the right: “BALLROOM CHARLESTON TANGO AND MORE. Reasonable Prices.”
Irony abounds in Ms. Storer’s work, which is no surprise, given some of the startling contradictions that have marked her life. When she was 15 or so, she uncovered a family secret while telling a dinnertime story about her boss at the department store where she worked as a teen. When she imitated his Yiddish accent, her mother ran from the room.
That’s when Ms. Storer confirmed an intuition that had been gnawing at her.
“Dad, am I Jewish?”
“Yes,” he replied. “But we must never speak of that.”
Her parents, both German, left their homeland not long before Adolph Hitler came to power. Her father, a Catholic, was a decorated fighter pilot during World War I. The Nazis were eager to draft him into the Luftwaffe, but he fled with his bride before they could. One of his cousins later participated in the murder attempt on the Fuehrer, conspiring with a group of officers to place a bomb under his chair.
Her parents arrived in Cuba before moving to Santa Monica, where Ms. Storer was born.
“I grew up in a household of fear because my mother was Jewish, and they were hiding it,” she said. “She always thought Hitler was going to come and get her. It informed her whole life, and so it informed mine.”
It wasn’t until after her mother died that she learned she had 29 Jewish cousins who had fled the Nazis—and they lived just minutes away in greater Los Angeles.
“I grew up with secrets and lies,” she said.
Ms. Storer has been transforming life into art for as long as she can remember, beginning with sandcastles at age 3. Her journey down a more serious artistic path began after she enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1950s, arriving on campus during the cultural ferment of the Beat Generation.
“I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” she recalled.
She enrolled in painting classes—one of very few women to do so—and began designing sets for Mask and Dagger, a student theater group. She painted one red, not an opportune choice during a time of Cold War loyalty oaths. She was told to paint it over.
She left Berkeley after two years, made a detour to San Francisco and then moved to Inverness in the early 1960s with her first husband, Tom Storer, who represented West Marin on the Board of Supervisors. They had four children, but their marriage unraveled, and suddenly Ms. Storer was a single mom.
She’d already been selling paintings—one covered the $500 down payment on the couple’s first house—but she was going to need steadier work, which she found as an art teacher after graduating from Dominican University and getting her master’s at Cal State in San Francisco.
She began stringing together teaching gigs at College of Marin, Sonoma State, San Francisco State and the San Francisco Art Institute, where she taught for nearly 20 years.
In the early days, the College of Marin allowed her to teach a life drawing class in Point Reyes Station. The class met each week in the building now occupied by Cabaline Country Emporium. Each time they gathered, young boys on their way to West Marin School would hop up to peer through the transom, trying to catch a glimpse of the nude model.
After four years of single-mom hardship, Ms. Storer fell in love with Prince Andrew Romanoff, a descendant of Russian tsars who had somehow found his way to West Marin. He was a handsome, quirky artist whose creative temperament suited her own. He brought two children along with him, and they became an offbeat rendition of the Brady Bunch.
Sixty-five bucks covered their wedding expenses at the Heart of Reno Chapel, where their union was sealed by “Reverend Irene,” who also officiated at Little Richard’s wedding. Their union lasted 48 years, until Prince Andrew passed away in 2021.
A piece called “Challengers” seems to capture an essential thread in Ms. Storer’s worldview: When life throws bad stuff your way, keep going and smile if you can. There are two figures dancing, and a Russian bear is in the frame. With a flower in his hand, wearing striped pants and shirt, he looks like he could be an escapee from the circus. He’s trying to stay light on his feet, but there’s a weight on his foot. The second man holds an umbrella over his head, because a storm is coming.
“It’s a parody,” Ms. Storer said. “Life is not a bowl of cherries. Dance until you can’t.”
Diane Levy, an Inverness art collector, has four of Ms. Storer’s works hanging on the walls of her home, including one with Superwoman bursting through the frame, wielding a lasso and coming to save the day, even though she probably can’t.
“There’s a lot of art that gets old, tiring,” Ms. Levy said. “I’ve never felt that way about Inez’s work. It always brings me pleasure.”