“Summer and Stone” by Jack Laycox is one of the late artist’s many paintings on display at Milinda Perry Gallery through Sept. 10. A reception will be held Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m.
(Painting by Jack Laycox)

By Vicki Byrum Dennis
Special to the Herald

Jack Laycox is considered to be one of California’s leading artists in the 1960s and ’70s. But for Crockett artist Cydne Kaye, he was not only the painter of amazing watercolors and oils. He was Uncle Jack, her mother’s brother, who just happened to be a famous artist.
“By the time I came along, he had given up his engineering career and was painting full-time,” Kaye said. “I always admired his technique, his discipline. He and Aunt Jane would travel throughout the world, and he would come back with these amazing sketches that he turned into paintings.”
This year, Kaye decided it was time to introduce her uncle’s work to her friends and fellow artists in the Benicia area and to remind the Bay Area of her late uncle’s talent and influence. As a result, a collection of Laycox’s oils and watercolors are currently on exhibit at the Milinda Perry Salon and Gallery, 117 East F Street in Benicia.
A reception will be held at the gallery this Thursday, July 28, from 5 to 7 p.m. The public is invited to attend and to meet Kaye who will be on hand to talk about her uncle’s work and share her memories of him.
Laycox was born in Auburn in 1921, the eldest of four children. A talented artist even as a child, he received his engineering degree from UC Berkeley but also studied industrial design and illustration. He worked as a mechanical engineer for more than two decades, including stints during World War II with the U.S. Army Air Force, UC Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory and Oak Ridge, Tenn. He worked on some of the most secret design work of the war including the Manhattan Project, designing special scientific equipment used in the preparation of the first atomic bomb.
Throughout the years, his engineering work in industry involved a lot of travel which allowed Laycox and his wife, the sculptor Jane Amason, to see incredible sights throughout the country and world. He used these images to create some of his most memorable watercolor and oil paintings.
All the while, he continued to paint, and by 1959, he was ready to make a break.
As he said in an interview in 1973, “I decided I was getting to the point in life where I had to make a choice – to stay in the corporation, or to make a change and somehow go into art.”
He chose art.

Jack Laycox in his Walnut Creek home in 1961. (Courtesy photo)

At the time, the couple was living in Walnut Creek, and Laycox worked in Oakland. He began painting full time, creating watercolor and oils and developing a life-long love of working en plein air. But his business sense told him he had to make a living with his art.Throughout his art career, he became a master at marketing his work. He opened his first gallery in Walnut Creek in 1961.
Laycox established long-time relationships with corporate clients. His paintings were used in calendars, posters, ads and hung in corporate offices for clients such as Shell Oil, General Tire International and Williamhouse –Regency Cards. Delta Airlines commissioned him to paint travel posters to showcase the airline’s destinations.
He wrote “Dramatic Paintings from Familiar Scenes” as part of the Walter Foster Publishing art book series. He conducted workshops, taking students on painting vacations to places such as Yugoslavia and Portugal.
His watercolors and oils attracted enthusiastic art patrons throughout the world. In 1965, Pierre Mornand of the prestigious Parisian magazine, La Revue Moderne, called his work “large, animated, dynamic, vivid and pulsating…an exciting experience.” His paintings were shown throughout the world and the United States including a Royal Watercolor Society exhibition in London, the Contemporary American Art Exhibition in Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan, and the National Academy Galleries in New York.
In California, he exhibited at such prominent museums such as the H.M de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Crocker in Sacramento. His paintings were in the private collections of well-known art enthusiasts such as Bill Harrah in Nevada, Roone Arledge in New York, and Miss Barbara Stanwyck of Beverly Hills.
In 1964, the Laycoxes moved to Carmel where he established his second Laycox Gallery. In 1970, Laycox, always interested in singing, joined a local barbershop group, The Windjammer Quartet. He sang lead with the group and continued painting until his death in Carmel in 1985.
Laycox is most well-known for his landscapes, many of which are based on the sights he and his wife saw in their journeys throughout the world. As they traveled, Laycox would paint, and these scenes are captured in his watercolors and oils. But he also frequently returned to the subject of the beauty to be found in California and in its mountains, streams, coastline, and historic places.
The Laycox exhibit at Milinda Perry’s contains a cross-section of landscapes in both watercolor and oil.
“I am so excited about this opportunity to show Jack’s work again,” Kaye said. “They are so precious to me and my family. And they were enjoyed by so many people throughout the world. It is just great to have them displayed for everyone to see again.”
The Jack Laycox exhibit will run through Sunday, Sept. 10.

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