GEORGE STILLMAN
Painter, Photographer, 1921-1997

George Stillman was one of the youngest and least experienced of the Sausalito group (James Budd Dixon, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, Walter Kuhlman) artists, but he was among the most independent. "You could never pin him down," Edward Dugmore recalled. "He had this wild imagination. He was able to put blinders on in a sense and just paint what he wanted to paint, no influence at all from anybody."
- Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, University of California Press

This was when (1946) I met all of the people that have become part of the historical group like Hassel Smith, David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Clyfford Still.... And then the people that aren't as important but I think are important, like George Stillman, he's a guy that you ought to look up....he was teaching there and was doing paintings I thought were better than Still's by far.
- Wall Hedrick quoted by Paul Karlstrom, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

For the most part, Stillman's work belongs to the quietest branch of Abstract Expressionism, which preferred to transport the imagination rather than jolt the senses with stunts of stylistic audacity.
- Susan Landauer, Paper Trails: San Francisco Abstract Expressionist Prints, Drawings, and Watercolors

Education and Teaching
Attended Chaffey College, Alta Loma, California, A.A., 1941; University of California, Berkeley, 1941-1942. Studied collections at Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1942-1946; attended New York University, 1943; California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, 1946-1949; Arizona State University, Tempe, B.F.A., 1968; M.F.A., 1970. Taught at Columbus College, Georgia, 1970-1972; Central Washington University, Ellensburg, 1972-1988.

Selected Solo Exhibitions 1945-1975
Artist's Guild Gallery, San Francisco, 1948; Galería de Arte Moderna, Mexico City, 1951; Arizona State University, Tempe, 1970; LaGrange College Gallery, Georgia, 1970; Columbus Museum of Art, Georgia, 1972; Gallery of Art, Phoenix, 1974; Yakima Public Library, Yakima, Washington.

Selected Group Exhibitions 1945-1975
Second Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Painting, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1947-1948; 67th-70th Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association (from 1961, San Francisco Art Institute) at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1948-1951; A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950, The Oakland Museum, 1973.