The Artist
Zoray Andrus was born in 1908 in the house that her grandfather had built at the far west end of Alameda. The view from the breakfast room on the upper floor was of, first, the family cow then a half a mile or so of Italian truck gardens followed by another half mile of rotting clipper ships from the Alaska Packer fleet and then, on the horizon, the city of San Francisco. Zoray’s mother made fancy ladies hats and she and her friends painted flowers on china coffee sets. At the age of 6 Zoray was doing loose confident adult style drawings and when she was 14 a rather modern looking house she designed was built by her father and grandfather in the Fruitvale district of Oakland. After Alameda high school she attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Her teachers there had been the founders of that school; a couple of her favorites were Isabel Percy West and Xavier Martinez, whom she called Marty. After graduating from CCAC in 1930 she studied with Glenn Wessels and Hans Hoffman at the University of California Berkeley. Subsequently she studied with Alexander Achipenko, first at Mills College and then at Peggy Guggenheim’s place in Woodstock New York. She liked it to do an impression of Peggy shouting “Archipenko take the garbage out!”
Back in San Francisco for the Great Depression, Zoray found a lot of her friends living in “The Monkey Block” and working for the WPA. She assisted on some murals and then got her own WPA job as director of costume design for the Federal Theatre Project Western Division. Her oral history of this experience is on file at the Library of Congress.
In 1935 Zoray and her friend Muriel Goodman who was from Reno and whom she’d met at CCAC, took the train to Virginia City on a painting expedition. They had been inspired by a show they’d seen of Virginia City paintings by the Bruton sisters. Relaxing at the bar of the Virginia Hotel (long gone) after a day of painting plein air, they met a dashing engineer, superintendent of the Sierra Nevada, Eric Kraemer. Zoray would occasionally mention that she and her high school girlfriends had followed his career in the San Francisco papers where he’d been called” Stanford’s tall dark and handsome breaststroker”!
By 1936 Zoray and Erik were married and living in The Nevada Brewery, a vast and wondrous structure built on top of Virginia City’s original Pony Express station in 1863. “The Brewery” had a full-size bar in the living room, a poker room, a beer garden, summer houses, a great stone room for storing malt and all the equipment for making steam beer and barrels. The Schnitzer’s who had a brewed there for generations agreed to sell it to the young couple for $600 on the condition that they promise not to make any beer; otherwise the price would have been $10,000!
By the end of the 30s “The Brewery” with 12 extra bedrooms and ample studio space had become the great basin stop off for artists from elsewhere. Most came from the coast and some from farther afield. Zoray’s friend Caress Crosby, who had an old mill near Paris that had also filled up with artists, sent Jean Varda, Henry Miller, Frieda Lawrence and Salvador Dali to have a look. Varda kept the studio with works in progress on the second floor for many years. Helen Mayre Thomas and Phyllis Walsh would frequently bring their houseguests over to visit and Erik and Zoray would take theirs out to the S-S. On one Helen and Phyllis visit Goya, the brewery dog, ate Tallulah Bankhead’s chinchilla jacket!
Virginia City became a hangout for literary and historian types who’d come from back east for divorce; some stayed on for the next marriage, and a few even stayed till the divorce after that! In about 1947 (?) A. J. Liebling married Lucille Spectorsky in the beer garden behind the brewery, Lucius Beebe gave away the bride. When Lucille came back in 1956 for the divorce she stayed with Zoray at the brewery and had an adventure in the Black Rock Desert which she wrote about which in turn inspired Arthur Miller to write the movie “The Misfits.”
Zoray was busy painting at the brewery up through the 50s. During the McCarthy HUAC period the art department at the University of Nevada was forbidden to have life drawing classes, so some of the faculty and students guzzled mulled wine and drew naked people in the brewery’s barroom. Naturally the curtains were drawn which led some of the neighbors to conclude that a communist cell meeting must be going on! This resulted in the curious site of guys in dark suits and city shoes walking down the dirt road to interview Zoray about her friends from the WPA.
By the end of the 50s the release of the TV show Bonanza had so spoiled bar life in Virginia City that arts and culture decided to go somewhere else. in 1959 Zoray sold the brewery and headed for San Francisco. For a while in the 60s she had a penthouse studio atop a very Chinese building at the corner of Pine and Grant. Outside her window was a gigantic office building wall of white marble. In her time there she did a lot of collage, and she liked telling of her travels with her favorite rice paper supplier, through long tunnels and warehouses under Chinatown.
In the late 60s she went to New York for a couple of years and got a job painting dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History. In this time she also was artist in residence at an Inn in Massachusetts where she experimented with spray paint and leaves.
In the early 70s Z moved back to Virginia City and did more painting this time generally in acrylic. In the mid-70s she moved to Cuernavaca Morelos just south of Mexico City. While there she did one series of color drawings of women in the market and another series of spiral line abstractions which had been a recurring theme in her work.
Around 1980 Z rented a small apartment in North Beach back in San Francisco and and joined the Fort Mason Printmakers where she did printmaking of all types but eventually settling upon Monotype as her favorite most painterly technique. She particularly liked the colors available in the printing inks and she used them to create a large body of work that represents the culmination of her work as a painter.
In the late 80s Z returned Alameda where she’d begun in 1908. She continued working Fort Mason until 1990. In February 1990 couple of months short of her 82nd birthday she had a heart attack, and seemed to be recovering at the hospital in Alameda until a careless doctor said “Well you won’t be turning the wheel on an etching press anymore” she gave him a dirty look and the next morning she died. It’d been a cold and dark February until that morning when a great cinematic ray of sunlight broke through the clouds and lit up that part of town.