17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Robilee Frederick, Bay Area artist who painted with animal guts and dined with Pavorotti, dies at 93
In her quest to reach her audience on a gut level, abstract painter Robilee Frederick took it to the extreme. She stretched out sausage casings to form a canvas and applied strings of animal stomach fiber in place of paint.
'It was very powerful, visceral work,' explained Indigo Ceballos, curator at the Hess Collection Winery in Napa Valley. 'She was using viscera.'
Frederick was also using gunpowder, flame, cigarette ash and seed pods in her Napa art studio and science lab. She called herself a 'process' painter to emphasize the point that the act of creation was as important as the end product. She was handy with a blowtorch and incense coils and liked to drip candle wax on a canvas before dipping her brush in oil paint. When she wanted to make her paintings translucent, she hired an engineer to backlight the canvas in neon.
Frederick was also a sculptor, and her work in a wide variety of media was exhibited in Bay Area galleries and in the collection of at least one major museum, with a concentration of her work in private museums of wineries in the Napa Valley, where she lived. She was still at work in her home studio in St. Helena into her 90s when she became too frail to operate her blowtorch and sand her surfaces with a power tool.
Still, the only way for her three children to keep her from going to work at 9 a.m. and turning on the classical music was to close down the studio and move her to her son Duncan's home in Huntington Beach. She died of natural causes in hospice care on June 14, said her daughter and art manager Robin Frederick. She was 93.
'I've never encountered anyone so driven, so inspiring and so deeply creative,' said her daughter, a producer who works in film, video and digital media in Los Angeles. 'She excelled at anything she touched, whether it was in the kitchen, at the piano or in her studio. She was an extraordinary, visionary artist.'
Frederick herself did not discover this until she was in her early 50s and had sent the last of her children off to college. Living in San Rafael with her first husband, Kirk Frederick, she enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland to pursue her MA, but she did not complete her degree.
In 1985, she had her first gallery show, and in 1994, she became represented by Braunstein/Quay Gallery. The solo show titles back then were always specific to her media. 'Smoke and Memory' was followed by 'Light Shadow Burn' in 1999 and 'Heat & Light' in 2002.
'Robilee was a very, very, very gracious and multi-talented person, and also a little bit of a mad scientist, or maybe just mad,' said Shannon Trimble, who worked at Braunstein/Quay and developed this assessment by watching Frederick in her home studio. 'She often had to work on a flat metal surface because of the materials she was handling and in this very creative way of torching and burning she would build the surface into a luminous finish.'
In 1996 she created a child's dress made out of animal gut that was suspended on wire for a group show, called 'Veil of Memory' at the San Francisco Arts Commissions Gallery in the Veterans Building. She was also part of 'Circle of Memory,' a four-person show organized by fellow Napa Valley artist Eleanor Coppola. It opened at the Oakland Art Gallery in Oakland in 2003 and spent 11 years on display, traveling worldwide.
A light box titled 'Veiled Light V' from her 2002 solo show at Braunstein/Quay was acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, who operate the de Young and Legion of Honor.
Robilee (pronounced Robby-Lee) Patrick McCallister was born Oct. 8, 1931 in Evansville, Ind. Her father, Ivan McAllister, worked in real estate and insurance and played classical violin. Her mother, also named Robilee, was a schoolteacher who enrolled her daughter, known as 'Robby,' in piano lessons at age 5.
By age 10, she had advanced to the point that she was sent to St. Louis to study under concert pianist Corinne Frederick. By then the family had moved to Carmi, Ill. To get to her weekly private lesson on Saturday, Robilee and Robby had to board the morning train at 4:30 a.m. and travel 120 miles. The ride took hours, and this is where she learned to draw, sketching portraits of passengers on the train in colored pencil in order to pass the time in each direction.
Her love of drawing outlasted her love of the piano, but not her love of the piano teacher's son, Kirk Frederick. After graduating from high school, she boarded a train for Wellesley College in Mass., where she majored in music.
After graduating in 1953, she moved to New York City parlaying her sketching skills into a job as an illustrator for Harper's Bazaar magazine. This is when the piano teacher's son re-entered her life. He came to visit her at her air-conditioned apartment, then one of the few, on the Upper East Side. It was nice and cool so he stayed. They married in 1952, then moved to San Francisco where Kirk became vice president of Fibreboard Corp. Their first two kids, Duncan and Robilee III (who goes by Robin), were born while the family lived in Tiburon. By the time her other two kids, Kirk and Logan, were born, they had moved to San Rafael.
They lived in a three-story Georgian Colonial home that was big enough for two grand pianos in the music room and many dinner parties, often linked to Robilee's position at the San Francisco Opera Guild.
'Beverly Sills and Luciano Pavarotti would come over for dinner when performing with the San Francisco Opera because they loved my mother's cooking,' said Robin. A favorite was the curry recipe from Trader Vic's. 'I remember being in the back seat of my dad's Jag, sandwiched between Sills and Pavarotti, driving over the Golden Gate to get to the Opera House on time.'
Kirk Frederick died in 1976, at age 52, and Robilee sold the big house and bought a house on Pacific Avenue in the city. She met her second husband, California home developer Ben Deane, on a setup date. They were married in Big Sur in 1985 and built a house with a separate art studio on Howell Mountain in St. Helena.
When they put it on the market in 1990, the listing caught the attention of Herb Caen, who had always admired Robilee's style. 'Ben and Robilee Deane's showplace above Meadowood in Napa Valley is on the market for $3.4 million, and that's our affordable-housing replay for today,' Caen wrote. 'How big is it? How many houses have an indoor golf driving range?'
The Deanes then moved to a home on the Spottswoode Estate, where they lived until Deane's death in 2005.
Ben Deane liked to play backgammon with Swiss winemaker and art collector Donald Hess and during a game Deane suggested he check out his wife's artwork. Hess became intrigued by her use of light, particularly in side-by-side paintings, one lit and one unlit. He began collecting and displaying her work in his galleries and curator Ceballos hung her work alongside paintings by 20th century masters Francis Bacon and Robert Rauschenberg.
One day Ceballos saw Hess studying the artworks together and commented, 'She really holds her own against the big guys. I'm proud of her.'
