Saturday Obituaries

11/19/05

ARANDA, Jose P.

July 4, 1927 - Nov. 12, 2005

Jose P. Aranda, 79 of Santa Barbara, died Saturday, November 12, 2005 at 1:05am. He was born in Texas and was a 40-year member of the Fraternal Order of Eagles in Santa Barbara.

Cause of death was related to cancer. He was a resident at Senior Living Concepts in Santa Barbara.

Jose is survived by close friend, Ana Maria Lopez; three sisters, Patra Casino of San Angelo, TX, Pasgula Blanco of Corpus Christi, Paula Cortez of Ventura, CA; son, Tibursio Cruz of Winton, CA; daughter, Rosa Aranda Velarde and her husband; Matthew Velarde of San Diego; 24 grandchildren and 50+ great-grandchildren. And many friends at The Fraternal Order of Eagles.

Services will be held at 1:00pm on Monday, November 21, 2005 at Welch-Ryce-Haider Funeral Chapel. Followed by dinner at Fraternal Order of Eagles, 923 Bath St., Santa Barbara, CA 93101. (805) 966-2113. Donations can be made to: Fraternal Order of Eagles.

Arrangements by Welch-Ryce-Haider.

SPAULDING, Selden

1922 - 2005

Selden Spaulding passed away on October 31, 2005, in San Francisco, after a short illness; he was 83. Denny, as he was known by family and friends, was born in Oxnard on March 14, 1922, the third child of Margaret and Edward Selden Spaulding whose family home was on Mission Canyon Road, Santa Barbara. His siblings, all close in age, were Margaret, Ed, and Ruth. For his education through high school, he attended the Hope Ranch school where his father was founding headmaster, Laguna Blanca, graduating in 1939 and distinguishing himself as a talented and serious artist and student. With his cousin Tony Spaulding, he took a post-graduate year at The Hill School in Pennsylvania, where his brother Ed had been an athletic star two years before. He went on to Princeton University to major in his passion: art and archaeology. He graduated from Princeton in 1943, a year early, in a US Army program to speed young officers into the European theater of World War II.

Assigned from 1943 until 1945 to work as an aide-de-camp to General Jesmond Balmer, whom in later years he enjoyed referring to as "General Bomber," young Lieutenant Spaulding saw enough of northern Europe to know that he wanted one day to return to France to live. So after returning to Santa Barbara for five years and beginning in earnest his lifetime dedication to painting, he moved to France as an ex-patriot artist in 1950. Arriving in Paris to attend art school and study French, he eventually moved to the south of France and bought a plot of vineyard outside the beautiful port town of La Ciotat. Quickly, he came to feel at home in France, despite the challenges of adapting to the language and culture. In later years he loved to tell stories about his gaffes, which sometimes got him in trouble, but his efforts usually endeared him to the French. He made friends easily and began to think about making France his permanent home.

Totally immersed in a life of painting, he continued to work in his small spare stone house, producing landscapes that reflected his luminous Mediterranean surroundings, cultivating his vineyard, producing enough grapes to make his own wine supply each year. Like many French at the time, his youngest neighbors had a hard time pronouncing his last name and resorted to calling him "Monsieur Pudding."

His adult artist friends, who had similar problems with his first name, suggested that he adopt a common French name, "Jerome," for simplicity. That name stuck with him throughout his years in France.

After a number of years in La Ciatot, Denny decided to trade his rustic life in the vineyard for the rising art world of Cannes and then Paris, to be closer to his colony of artistic friends, some of them quite famous. In Cannes he lived in a simple third-floor apartment and made frequent visits to his friends' homes and studios in Antibes. Then in Paris, he bought a small apartment in the Bastille district, where he loved the hustle-bustle and lack of pretension of the then working-class neighborhood. By the time he moved to Paris, his painting style had begun to change dramatically, from largely representational to completely abstract. He began to paint on canvas stretched out on the floor, dropping diluted paint from above and creating rich multicolored patterns. An Italian art critic "discovered" him and hailed him for his new style in a book published in Italian.

In the early 1960s, Denny's paintings attracted attention in the United States. After the success of a gallery show in Los Angeles in 1964, he returned to live in Santa Barbara, where he had a number of shows at the Esther Baer's Gallery. In the tumultuous politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in association with his dear friend Kit Tremaine, he became increasingly active in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam-war movements. And then in the late 1970s he and Kit moved north to the small coastal town of Elk, in Mendocino County. He designed and built a house for each of them and was thrilled by the light and views from his house and studio, perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In what was to be perhaps the most prolific period of his artistic career, his painting style again evolved, this time to slightly abstract and vibrantly colored landscapes inspired by his new surroundings.

In the early 1980s, Denny moved to San Francisco, where he continued to paint in his Victorian house in the Castro District and had a number of shows at local galleries. By the mid-1990s, Denny's ability to paint was slowed down and then completely stopped by problems with his hands that surgery failed to correct. Instead of painting, the highlight of each day became his walk of an hour or two to explore surrounding neighborhoods and appreciate the diverse architecture and street life of San Francisco. Denny, who never married or had children, always derived great pleasure from keeping up with numerous nieces, nephews, cousins, and friends in the United States and France. His paintings now reside in the permanent collections of a number of museums, including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He is survived by his sister Ruth Seaman of Coronado and twelve nieces and nephews.