Pam Glover

Pam Glover (1924-2010)

Biography of Pam Glover

Pam Glover is recognized as one of the major plein-air landscape painters in California. Influenced by early years in foreign lands, and a variety of styles and mediums, Glover is best known as a plein-air painter in the Colorist tradition. Her work is notable for bold, rapid brushwork and the use of rich layers of oil paint using brilliant pigments. Glover continues in the tradition of the Society of Six, who broke new ground in the 1920’s with their bright, Fauvist paintings of local East Bay scenes.

Born to English parent and raised in China, Glover was exposed at an early age to Far Eastern art and took private lesson from a Russian painter when she was 15. She was evacuated to Australia during World War II where she studied for three years with Olga Popoff in Sydney and met her husband George. In the 1950’s the married couple immigrated to the United States where they settled in the Bay Area, and Pam enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

Arguably the most important and lasting influence on her work occurred in the 1970s, when she painted with one of the surviving members of the Society of Six, Louis Siegriest and his son Lundy. Motivated by a retrospective of the Six at the Oakland Art Museum, Louis and his son Lundy began painting outdoors, often in the same locations as the Six had done some 50 years before.  Pam broke the gender barrier of the all-male group with the help of teenage daughter Anne Marie, who had been accepted into the group by the traditionally all-male membership. This four-year period was a turning point in Glover’s career and signified the re-emergence of the Colorist tradition in Northern California. Up to this time Glover had been doing abstract, mixed media work.

In addition to her historical link to the Six, Glover has influenced hundreds of students who have enrolled in her plein air painting classes which she has taught for the past 25 years through the Orinda Community Center. Some of her students have become painting teachers themselves. A lasting tribute to Glover is the self-described “Glover Group”, an organization of Pam’s former students who continue the plein air tradition, exhibiting their works around the State, often as fundraisers for environmental causes.

In the 1990’s, Glover, along with six other painters, formed the Outsiders, a group of seven

Bay Area painters who gained their inspiration from the Six and the Bay Area Figurative School.  In association with the Outsiders, Pam participated in three museum shows in 2005.

Now in her 80’s Glover continues to teach her painting classes weekly and to paint en plein air  in the East Bay, Napa Valley, Half Moon Bay, and the Delta. 

Glover had a yearly one-woman show for 19 years at the Maxwell Gallery in San Francisco, a one-woman show at the Hearst Gallery at St. Mary’s College, and continues to show at Nancy Dodd’s Gallery in Carmel, the Kerwin Galleries in Burlingame, and the Epperson Gallery in Crockett, among others.  She is the winner of prestigious awards including a top prize at the California State Fair. Her works appear in hundreds of private and corporate collections.  She has been a member of the Marin Society of Artists, the Oakland Art Association, the San Francisco Artist Co-Operative, and the East Bay Art Association.