Joseph (Joe) Charles Tanous was born in Hettinger, North Dakota on January 10, 1925, one of the younger of 11 children. After living a long life filled with art and great adventures, he passed away peacefully, surrounded by family, on November 22, 2021, just shy of his 97th birthday.Joe was raised in North Dakota. He first got interested in art when an older brother left home to attend art school in Minneapolis. At age five he once complained about returning to his kindergarten classroom because “the Crayola’s aren’t ‘red’ enough for drawing an apple.”After high school he was drafted and completed his basic training at Ft. Ord in Monterey County. He saw military action in the Pacific during World War II, first in a camouflage unit and later with the U.S. Corps of Engineers in Guam where he helped build roads, bridges, and airstrips.Using the G.I. Bill, Joe enrolled at San Jose State to study painting; but he soon wanted a more rigorous program. He transferred to the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He spent the next 10 years working in commercial art for advertising in Los Angeles and San Francisco.It was in The City where he first met the woman who would become his wife, Louise, while she was waitressing at a coffee shop. Their relationship began over a conversation about an Ogden Nash poem. They fell in love, married in 1954, and spent their honeymoon in romantic Carmel-by-the-Sea where they decided they hoped to live one day. Meanwhile, they created an artistic life together during thebeatnik era of San Francisco, hanging out with notables of those times while beginning their life-long pursuit of acquiring and curating eclectic, esoteric collections. These favored items included many indications of “sculpture in utilitarian form,” everything from copper pots, molds and utensils, wooden potato mashers, printers’ metal type, Samoan carvings and spears, and Native American pottery, basketry and rugs. They even collected a life-size mannequin “who” lived in various rooms of their home. Joe and Louise never lost theirpassion for garage sales and “serendipitous finds.” Fortunately, Joe also liked to dust.Once their first two children Mark and Laura came along, Louise decided she and Joe needed more education. They set off for UC Davis. While Louise earned a PhD in Anthropology, Joe thrived in the Art Department at a very exciting time in its history. He shared a studio in an orchard with multi-media artist Bruce Nauman, took a ceramics course from sculptor Robert Arneson, worked in bronze and aluminum under Tio Gianbruni, studied graphic arts and intaglio etching with Daniel Shapiro, sharpened his painting talent, and was honored to be chosen as Wayne Thiebaud’s teaching assistant.During these Davis years, Joe had solo exhibits at the Crocker Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and University of the Pacific in Stockton. Said Tanous of this period, “I feel my work has been influenced greatly by my association with Thiebaud as well as by the works of Rene Magritte and Richard Diebenkorn. Thiebaud instilled in me a willingness to explore and experiment with alternating mediums....My only regret is never buying any of his paintings.”An ArtForum critic wrote of one of Tanous’ early shows, "His thorough training, humor and imagination are evidenced in the delightful little Brueghel-ish composition of children palying in snow. An enamel painting of one huge pinkish-blue wave, deceptively sweet and beautiful despite the menacing power of the underlying sea, reveals a North Dakota boy's understanding of and respect for the elements."With a Master’s degree in Fine Art in hand, plus the arrival of daughter Holly, Joe and Louise accepted teaching positions at the American University Beirut in Lebanon in 1967, where Joe rose to Chair of the Art Department, teaching painting, sculpture, and ceramics. He inspired and mentored many students who stayed in touch with him for decades to come.After three years in Lebanon, the family returned to the Bay Area. By 1970 they were living in their beloved Carmel full-time, in a small granite stone and redwood board-and-batten house that former Carmel Mayor Perry Newberry had built for himself back in 1925. They dove into the art scene. Louise was a force of Nature. She taught at Carmel High School for twenty years in addition to extensive volunteering for Friends of the Carmel Library, SPCA thrift shop, Murphy House Heritage Society, Bach Festival, and the Saint Bernards, a network of thoughtful folks who offered support to elderly or infirm neighbors. Joe combined teaching painting and drawing at Monterey Peninsula College withhis daily studio practice, working out of the Sunset Center’s Art Studio 15 for the next three decades. Tanous juried into the Carmel Art Association in 1971 where he exhibited for another half century.Joe was never a plein air artist. He preferred to observe the ocean, the wave action, and the cloud formations and then return to his studio to create on a canvas. But when Tanous felt “washed out on painting” in the early 1980s, he began exploring new approaches to the recently reawakened 17th century Italian art of monotype print-making. Joe used a zinc plate and oil paint rather than traditional printing inks, resulting in what he found to be “very freeing in its flexibility and expressiveness, versus the rigidity of traditional etching...a fun form of print-making, open to rich, subtle effects.”His finished plates were printed on an etching press using a Japanese all-fiber paper which created absolute fidelity to the original paintings on the plates. His subjects were intimate vignettes of the Monterey coastal region that suggested the sights, sounds and scents of surf, cresting waves, sea flora and fauna, waving pampas grass, sand dunes, and people engaging in beach activities from a bird’s eye perspective. He referred to this series as “California Moments.”The 1990s found Tanous turning to surrealism. An art critic wrote of Joe’s “Pearscapes” series on exhibit at Marjorie Evans Gallery in Sunset Center, “Tanous’ sophisticated paintings express his innate feeling for the relationship of color, space, and mood. His method has a narcotic effect. The viewer’s response is effortless, because of the artist’s understanding of crisp, transparent value changes ....Tanous has such seemingly great control of color that he is left totally free to mirror his mind. And he is so successful at this that we have to make a conscious effort to find the “how” in his process....His subject matter is a vehicle for aesthetics....The rest of the show features Joe Tanous’ ceramics. He can pot as well as paint! They are playful, organic, whimsical, and functional. Tanous displays the ability to simplify form without surrendering texture, delicacy or content.” Joe retired from teaching in 2000 and lost his adored Louise in 2017. He continued to paint after her death up until about six months before he passed away. He gave all of his 7 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren drawing lessons and encouraged them to explore and create. His works won many prizes and awards including First Place in the Crocker Museums’ 10th Annual KingsleyExhibition and First place in Oil plus “Best of Show in Sculpture” at the MontereyPeninsula Museum of Art’s 7th Annual Exhibition. The following quotations are compiled from various interviews Joe gave between 1963 and 2012: I love to experiment with styles, techniques and materials. I get great joy from the intellectual challenges of all artistic endeavor.I’ll jump from an abstraction to a still life to a portrait to a surrealist landscape without even thinking about it. It’s been one of the problems I have had developing a body of work which leads to a reputation.I found bronze to be the most difficult medium to work in, ceramics the most fun, and painting the most intellectual. In my whole lifetime, I’ve never lost the joy of standing before my easel.