Judy Molyneux, who single-mindedly captured in vivid hues a circle of intimates and the light-filled beaches, bluffs and streets around her home in Bolinas for over half a century, died on March 20. She was 83 years old.
Ms. Molyneux produced an outpouring of works of astonishing lyricism, whimsy and intelligence that chronicled the swirl and rapturous energy of her town. Her influence reached beyond the canvas, and in 1980, uninterested in rubbing shoulders with blue-chip gallerists, she founded the Bolinas Gallery.
Now West Marin’s longest continuously operating exhibition space, the gallery has shown her own creations alongside works from fellow regional artists. Ms. Molyneux’s paintings have also been showcased in Bay Area museums and galleries, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
A prolific painter with protean tendencies, she played with a dizzying array of artistic styles but stayed true to the early modernists’ conviction that oil on canvas—with its ability to unlock “the visionary in all of us that sees the universe,” as she put it—could yield intimate and novel forms of expression.
For decades, she painted scenes of dancers in the streets of Bolinas, and she developed certain fixations on sunbathers, surfers and the colorful characters of town. She once said that she sought to paint “simple scenes with the underlying touch of grandeur which is always present.”
“She was an artist with a capital A,” said her friend, the musician Rick Gordon. “Her art was always close to the front of her persona.”
Judy Rebecca Molyneux was born on January 7, 1942 in Superior, Wis. Her father, Max, was raised Quaker and led dual lives as a potato farmer and Shakespeare professor, while her mother, Elizabeth, was a schoolteacher and hobby painter. As a child, she spent time at a lakeside home in Superior and a 300-acre farm on Lake Nabaggamon, where Judy, her identical twin, Mary, and their three older siblings assisted with chores.
Judy learned to drive a tractor by age 9, but she was also immersed in literature. Her mother read Dickens and other classics to the twins at bedtime, and her father had an extensive library from which she borrowed. She fell in love with Dostoevsky early on and aspired to become like the heroine of “The Idiot,” the alluring Nastasya Filippovna, a character universally desired and almost as universally condemned.
Judy’s idyllic rural upbringing ended abruptly when her father accepted a position to chair the humanities department at Alma College in Michigan. The family moved eastward, relocating to a small town where they lived in a clapboard house wedged among other clapboard houses.
Ms. Molyneux, who had drawn from a young age, attended art school at the University of Michigan, where she eventually earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history and printmaking. She learned by copying masters both old and modern—Rouault, Matisse, Delacroix, Michelangelo, Goya, Monet and Manet.
In 1961, while still a student, she married Arthur Meyer, the star quarterback of her high school, and they had a child. After she graduated, she took a brief teaching post at a small liberal arts college in Georgia, but she soon left Arthur and moved to San Francisco—a city that felt to her like a promised land. She took her son, Jamie, with her.
“When I saw California and walked to the edge of the Big Sur cliffs, I felt like I was home,” she said in a 2023 documentary about her work. “The light was part of me from when I was little. That’s a major part of what I hope to help to create—a sense of stunning light that radiates and comes into you and becomes part of you.”
In San Francisco, Ms. Molyneux met her second husband, Jim McCamant, a stockbroker, and they married in 1968. Soon after becoming pregnant with her second child—her daughter, Freya—the couple retreated north to Bolinas. In 1970, they bought a Portuguese-style stucco farmhouse with sloping ceilings and uneven floors on the Big Mesa for $19,000.
Ms. Molyneux laid vibrant mosaic tiles salvaged from the Jefferson Airplane house on Brighton Avenue to create a threshold to the home. She filled its walls with her artwork and adorned the kitchen cabinets with delicately painted monarch butterflies. She planted a garden laden with zucchini, tomatoes, beets, spinach and peas.
A few years later, Ms. Molyneux and Jim separated, and by 1978, she was sharing a life with clarinetist and composer Dale Polissar. Their relationship was creatively collaborative: he helped her hang, advertise and manage her painting exhibitions, while she supported him in producing original musical shows, recording jazz albums and playing gigs at restaurants around Marin.
“Every morning, no matter how she felt—inspired or not—she would go to the canvas and take up her brush,” Mr. Polissar said. “There were only two things she insisted on doing every day: painting and walking the beautiful land of West Marin.”
For more than 50 years, Ms. Molyneux painted daily, most often in the mornings. She worked in a backyard studio that opened into her garden, where at one point she raised rabbits that she would send off to Jim Tacherra for butchering. Jim would return tout le lapin, ready for her to braise.
Afternoons were spent roaming Bolinas’s roads and trails, photographing and sketching scenes she would later meticulously translate and rework on canvas. Frequently employing a palette knife rather than a brush, she moved pigment decisively while it was still wet and malleable. Periodically backing away from her easel, she would close one eye and raise a thumb.
Photographer Ilka Hartmann, a longtime friend, said the best way to describe Ms. Molyneux is the German word “schaffensfreude,” for the pleasure she derived from creating.
Throughout her career, Ms. Molyneux steadily moved toward abstraction. Her shifts in practice came from seeing in the margins of her paintings the possibility of something central. In the early 1970s, her “fogscapes” had a Turner-esque ethereality, with swirls of misty clouds obscuring craggy cliffs and stormy seas.
As Ms. Molyneux’s style matured, the delicate strokes of her early work evolved into brushy bravura. Using impasto to apply thick layers of freeform paint, she pitted energetic brushwork against the scenes she depicted. Subject matter flickered in and out of sight, disappearing into and then rising from the painted surface.
In her monumental “California Gold” (1986), a feverish and luxuriantly painted streetscape, she depicts a crowd of illuminated revelers. It’s a garden of earthly delights, a spectacle of flesh in motion teeming with familiar figures: Rick Klees dancing bare-chested, Allen Sternic rolling a joint on his guitar, Jerry Bo Jeste playing drums, Carly Zeno cradling her baby. Each is pulled out of the darkness of the painting’s polychrome symphony of green and blue by a light rendered with delicate specificity.
The painting is intimate rather than voyeuristic, revealing the creative frisson that can happen between an artist and her subject.
Ms. Molyneux often compared painting itself to a dance. “As if in meditation, a piece will draw me in, beginning a journey, like a dance, the mythos of that painting moves through color and harmonics with surprise elements,” she told the Light in 2009. “Hopefully, luckily, like a whirling dervish it takes me to a unique place.”
In the mid-1980s, Ms. Molyneux curated two shows of 100 artists, called “Bay Area Seen I and II,” in the Hall of Flowers in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. There she met Jerrold Turner, a landscape painter, who invited her to join group of plein air Fauvists that called themselves the Outsiders.
In her last decade, Ms. Molyneux’s paintings became playful and cartoonish, helium-filled antidotes to the darker undertones of her earlier work. In high-keyed, artificial hues, she applied paint urgently with quick strokes and minimal definition of shape.
“I love to paint in a surprised fashion,” she said. “Quite often I’ll close my eyes and for three or four minutes paint nonstop, then open my eyes and say, ‘Oh, that’s terrible,’ or ‘Wow, that’s something that I’d never have done if I had been controlling it, containing it, thinking about it.’ Let it all go. It’s almost like a midnight dance or something.”
Although her work rarely carried overt political messages, Ms. Molyneux regularly auctioned her paintings for humanitarian causes. She raised tens of thousands of dollars for Doctors Without Borders, World Central Kitchen, the Middle East Children’s Alliance and Border Angels. She donated most of her earnings in the final year of her life.
Sinewy in build and gruff of voice and manner, Ms. Molyneux was an outspoken and energetic advocate. Locally, she fought to maintain Bolinas’s small-town character, taking stances that others sometimes said were as quixotic as advocating to encase the town in amber. She opposed an eight-foot widening of Olema-Bolinas Road to accommodate a bike lane—a project she helped redirect into today’s off-road path—and resisted the removal of eucalyptus trees in town.
Perhaps most controversial of her activities were her guerilla-style methods of expunging the graffiti on Bolinas Beach. She painted over decades of markings—both tags and art—at night on the Brighton ramp and the seawalls. Critics called her an “art nazi,” while her nocturnal vigilantism inspired similar actions by others, including a surfer from Stinson Beach who supposedly painted over the street art while in the nude.
“Judy was fierce,” said Micah, a friend of four decades. “She was fiercely protective of her kids and her town and her art and the gallery. She fought to keep Bolinas the way it was. She was a controversial figure in town—she had her champions, and she had her detractors.”
Ms. Molyneux had arrived in Bolinas with other young idealists determined to protect the town’s natural beauty against urban encroachment.
“My mom was part of a generation that came to a conservative farm town after the Summer of Love and changed it into what we have now,” said her son, Jamie Meyer. “Now, they’re all slowly disappearing. She’s one of the founding members of this place’s unique countercultural ‘lets-do-it-differently’ ethos,’ and I think that’s going away.”
Her gallery on Wharf Road, converted from a mid-19th-century stagecoach waiting room and ticket office, was Ms. Molyneux’s creative mothership. She occupied its walls for a few months each year, allowing fellow artists to exhibit during the remaining periods, provided they meticulously cared for its antique, wide-planked redwood floors.
“Part of its charm is that it’s not an easy space to curate, because it is long and narrow and the walls are funky,” said artist Dieter Tremp, who has shown at least four times in the space and was recently on hands and knees waxing its floors.
Ms. Molyneux described the gallery as “womb-like.” “Folks are drawn into the work and are sort of transformed for a while. You can see it in their faces. It’s easier to create a separate reality for the viewer here,” she told the Light in 1990.
After she suffered a stroke last year, Ms. Molyneux was limited in her creative efforts to drawings she could produce from her wheelchair. She produced hundreds. Even these small, abstract compositions, made in soft, bleached pastels, often suggested a grand and expansive vision.
“To paint something is to touch something,” she once said. “It is to give it structure and meaning and respect.”
A memorial honoring Judy Molyneux’s life will be held on Sunday, June 29 at the Bolinas Community Center, beginning with a luncheon at 1 p.m., followed by a memorial program at 2 p.m.