Berla Emeree, oil on board, 24 x 18, 30 x 24” framed, signed lower right, Berla Emeree, El Paso, Texas.
Landscape painter Berla Iyone Emeree was born August 7, 1899 in Wichita, Kansas, but after 1907, grew up in El Paso, Texas. At age seventeen, she studied in Philadelphia with Frank Benton Ashley Linton and Michael Jacobs, and in Texas she was a student of Jose Arpa, Xavier Gonzalez, and Rolla Taylor Landscape painter Berla Iyone Emeree was born August 7, 1899 in Wichita, Kansas, but after 1907, grew up in El Paso, Texas. At age seventeen, she studied in Philadelphia with Frank Benton Ashley Linton and Michael Jacobs, and in Texas she was a student of Jose Arpa, Xavier Gonzalez, and Rolla Taylor.
She was an adventurous, independent woman, fearless in her travels alone by car to possible painting sites, where she would camp out. Emeree paid her expenses on a painting trip through Arizona in 1934 by selling or exchanging her pictures for gasoline. Painting the Grand Canyon and Granite Dells near Prescott, Emeree got lost in a desolate area of the state and had to be rescued.
But that was her independent nature. As a seven-year-old, she won first prize in a local exhibition. At twelve, she was the proprietor of her own china painting shop. This sense of being her own boss continued throughout her life. In El Paso, she opened the Emeree School of Art in 1924, and operated the Emeree Scenic Drive School, also in El Paso, in the late 1930s and 1940s.
Emeree's husband, William Emery, tragically died in 1922, shortly after their marriage. The young artist memorialized her husband, and her loss, by changing her last name and moving the "Y" to her original middle name of "Ione," making it "Iyone."
Emerge exhibited her paintings of the West and western life at the Texas Fine Art Association, Austin; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe; International Museum, El Paso; Fort Worth Museum of Art; Southern States Art League; Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibition, San Antonio.
Her work is in the collections of the Carnegie Public Library, Fort Worth, Texas; and Bowie High School, El Paso.
Berla Iyone Emeree died in El Paso, Texas January 8, 1948 in her forty-eighth year.