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Collections/California Scenes

Shop for artwork based on themed collections. Each image may be purchased as a canvas print, framed print, metal print, and more! Every purchase comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Subjects

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Artwork by Zora Design

Each image may be purchased as a canvas print, framed print, metal print, and more! Every purchase comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

About the Artists

Zora Design Zora Design is a large art collection of work created by two artists, Zora M Steenson and Hughberta E Steenson, sisters. Their art reflects the exciting era of Modern Art in America: the mid-twentieth century- the 1920's through the 1970's. Zora began a career as a professional artist at age seventeen in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the fabled Buzza Greeting Card Company. She worked at several art based companies, designing greeting cards and calendar illustrations as an employee and also as a free-lance artist through the 1940's. After the war, in 1948, she accompanied her sister, Hughberta, to Los Angeles, where the two immersed themselves in the vibrant art scene there.

As a veteran of the Second World War, Hughberta took advantage of the GI Bill and enrolled in the prestigious Chouinard Art Institute, considered by many to be the best art school in the world. Zora also studied at Chouinard, as well as at The Otis Institute and with Herbert Jepson, but the influences of instructors and friends from Chouinard are most apparent in her mid-century artwork.

Both sisters were quite attractive, Zora once won a beauty contest, however neither sister ever married, flaunting the conventions of the day. Art was their primary, abiding occupation. Zora made a living, one way or another as an artist, all her life. Hughberta, however, had a number of jobs as bookkeeper and during the war, she was trained by the Marine Corps as a 'shopkeeper,' which entailed learning to identify every single component of the airplane engines used by the Marines, and to be able to reassemble them. This skill carried over into her proficiency as a Cubist, and she painted a number of interesting pieces with discrete sections of an object reorganized in her own original, logical construction.

These two women started life in the wind-swept, nearly vacant plains of North Dakota. Zora was born in 1904, Hughberta in 1908. Art during their long lives chronicles, in a way, the tremendous changes, socially, culturally and technologically experienced during the twentieth century. Zora's darling child-like greeting card figures of the 1920's and 30's progressed to stunning abstractions of female figures painted in the 1950's. An amazing abstract-expressionist painting of cosmonauts circling the globe in their tiny space craft was Zora's accolade to man's heroic journey. From the wooden mule-driven flat-bed wagon to a rocket to the moon: she had seen it all.

The story of the interesting lives of Zora and Hughberta is told in the novel, 'Art Alone Enduring' by Mary Steenson.