Jerry Van Megert (1938-2024) American, Oil on Canvas. Depicts a glorious high view of Pebble Beach near Carmel, California. 

Overall: 22 X 26 in. 

Sight: 13 1/2 X 17 1/2 in. 

#7443 . 

Jerry Van Megert was born in Salem, Oregon on May 2nd, 1938. His childhood was spent on the family farm, where he began painting at the age of six capturing every animal, tree, and visitor he could in oils and watercolors. He learned by doing until he received an art scholarship to Salem’s Willamette University in 1956. For two years he studied at the private liberal arts college, training under the intense tutelage of art professor Carl Hill. Too eager to jump into painting, he left college early and devoted himself to refining his technique around the Salem area, before heading south to explore the West Coast art enclaves in California. He worked in Mendocino, Laguna Beach, and La Jolla, before finding a welcoming community in Carmel-by-the-Sea, and in 1970 he joined the Carmel Art Association. He also found community at the Bohemian Club, a gentleman’s social club in San Francisco, and the Bohemian Grove, a 160-acre encampment among the redwoods in Northern California. His base of operations quickly became what he referred to as his “painter’s perch” in a Pebble Beach sea cottage overlooking the craggy coastline. The property belonged to Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr., then CEO and chairman of his eponymous corporation, who liked Van Megert’s work and offered him a six-month caretaker residency. This eventually grew to 50 years, as he became their “Artist in Residence,” meeting and painting many well-known figures of the international business, political, and entertainment worlds along with their families and friends. He painted the coastline from Monterey to Big Sur in a soft color palette often known as “Van Megert Blue.” The CAA gave him a solo retrospective exhibition in the 1990s called “Van Megert: A Master Painter of the Monterey Peninsula.” In 1998 Van Megert rescued a Bechtel employee named Vicki Stewart who had gotten lost on the way to the property, and the two became inseparable friends for the next 30 years, although neither ever married. Their journeys together to visit her family and Christmases in Paris became common subjects for his later works. In 2018, in failing health but still determined to paint, he moved from the coastal cottage into The Park Lane in Monterey, where he passed away on June 7th, 2024. His many hundreds of paintings can be found in countless California museums, as well as corporate and private collections throughout the world.