Loralee Smith Durkee

Loralee Smith Durkee was born in 1922 in Tampico, Mexico, where her grandfather Mordello Vincent Sr. prospected as an oil wildcatter. Mordello had great success during the Tampico oil boom, but Loralee’s parents decided California would be a healthier environment for their daughter. The family moved to Glendale and later La Jolla, where her father Jack worked as an attorney and Loralee attended the Bishop’s School. Loralee went on to Stanford University, studying fine art with fellow student Richard Diebenkorn under Dan Mendelowitz, who instilled in her a lifelong passion for watercolor.

When World War II disrupted life, Loralee volunteered to serve in the Navy, working as a hydrographic technician in Los Angeles. She later used her GI Bill to attend the California Art Institute, and in 1951 Loralee began painting with the California Group, a band of San Francisco artists which included George Post, Rex Brandt, Phil Dike, and Emil Kosa. Each weekend they visited a different San Francisco neighborhood, bringing bag lunches and thermoses of Bloody Marys along with their brushes and paint tubes. Loralee’s subjects included many of the old Victorians in the Western Addition which have long since disappeared.

Loralee traveled the world and painted widely, from northern California to France and Mexico. Several of her watercolors hang on the walls of the San Francisco Towers, where she mostly lived for the last 20 years. Loralee continued at her easel well into her 90s and the Towers proudly used a photo of her painting the cityscape as part of its publicity material. For those lucky enough to have an invitation to her Jack Wheatman-designed apartment, the evocative watercolors on her walls were complemented by Loralee’s droll humor, wellstocked bar, and generous kitchen.

For almost a century Loralee Durkee lived with verve, originality, wit, and adventure, as her paintings in many private collections will long attest. Loralee is survived by her daughter Carolyn Adams, who guided her through this final year, and by her sons Doug and Jay Adams, her grandson Kerry Moffitt, and 2 greatgrandchildren. Loralee’s family asks her friends to join them in a final toast to a remarkable life!