Artist to present painting to Chinese president

Friday, April 12, 2002 | 9:52 a.m.

Internationally acclaimed seascape artist Violet Parkhurst may feel as comfortable at the sports book at Caesars Palace or Stardust as she does sitting at an easel creating one of her popular paintings.

In 1978, when her career was beginning to soar, the Los Angeles artist said she received a check for $98,000.

"I would have to have given most of it to the federal government," Parkhurst said recently during one of her monthly jaunts to Las Vegas. "That's when I started buying race horses."

Her tax dodge turned into a profitable enterprise.

"I've had 33 race horses over the years, and they all were winners," said Parkhurst, who has a number of her paintings on display at Sculptures, Antiquities and Art, a privately owned gallery on South Decatur Boulevard.

Later this month the fiesty 70-something artist, gambler, former foreign correspondent for several South American magazines, and lifelong adventuress heads to China, where she will present one of her original paintings to Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

The Chinese government invited Parkhurst to China after learning about her and her work from the World American Cultural Exchanges, a nonprofit organization that promotes greater relations between China and the United States.

What first caught the attention of the Chinese government was Parkhurst's connection with President Richard Nixon, who visited China in 1972 and opened up relations with the world's most populace nation. Nixon was one of four presidents who collected works by Parkhurst; others included Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

"Violet Parkhurst is one of the world's most celebrated marine artists," said Mary Stewart, a spokeswoman for World American Cultural Exchanges, which has offices in San Francisco and La Puente, Calif. "She will present a painting to the president of China at the Great Hall of the People's Republic of China in Beijing.

"The Great Hall is the most important and revered of all the government buildings in China," Stewart said. "The only people that have been in the building have been world political figures and high-profile dignitaries."

The ceremony will take place April 29.

Parkhurst also will present a painting to the China Fine Art Museum in Shanghai, to be part of the national museum's permanent collection.

"She is the first foreign artist who has ever had their work accepted by the museum," Stewart said.

Parkhurst, a native of Derby Line, Vt., received a scholarship in 1945 to study at a museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. En route, the ship she was aboard was commandeered by the military in Natal, Brazil. It was to be used as an army transport during a revolutionary uprising.

She stayed in Natal for several months and while there wrote "Jaguar by the Tale," a best-selling book in Brazil that described a number of her adventures while stranded in South America.

Also while in Brazil she became acquainted with several magazine publishers, and when she returned to the United States in 1946, settling in Los Angeles, she became a foreign correspondent, covering motion-picture celebrities for such magazines as Marilena, published in Rio de Janeiro.

In early 1962 Parkhurst, who continued to paint during the time she was a correspondent, decided to concentrate on her art.

"I had just enough money to open my first gallery," she said. "There was enough for the first month's rent."

It was on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles, not far from the famed Sportsman's Lodge, a hangout for celebrities.

"Nobody came to the gallery the first two weeks," Parkhurst said. "Then, one night I stayed open late because I was waiting to go out with some people. My first customer came in -- it was Steve Allen. Then behind him came Heddy Lamar."

Several other customers showed up that evening, and by the time she closed up shop that night she had sold enough paintings to pay three months' rent.

"By the end of the year, I owned the gallery," she said.

Although she has painted nudes and still lifes, Parkhurst's greatest claim to fame is her seascapes.

She said she once had to go to court to explain to a judge why she counted a yacht as a tax deduction.

"The judge was a collector of Parkhurst," she said. "I told him, 'You don't expect me to work from a postcard, do you?' "

She explained to the judge that she had to have the yacht for inspiration.

"I told him I didn't use the boat to take people out on, but to feel the ocean," Parkhurst said.

Parkhurst sold original paintings through her own galleries and prints through a number of venues, including Sears and Blue Chip Stamps, which, in the '50s and '60s were given away at service stations to customers who bought gas. Books of stamps could be traded for merchandise in a Blue Chip Stamp catalogue.

"A lot of people bought my paintings using Blue Chip Stamps," she said.

And now she has China's stamp of approval.