Background
Elwood Decker was born in Fresno, California on 8 April 1903.
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Elwood Decker
Edit ProfileEducation
Elwood Decker had attended high school in Oakland, California and then he later attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. In the year of 1952, Elwood Decker decided to enroll at Santa Monica City College to study photography.
Career
In the year of 1931, after Decker had done a tour of duty with the United States Army, he had come to live as an artist in the sand dunes of Oceano. He had found a group of artists that he had joined with. The artists included writers, poets, and free-thinkers who called themselves Dunites.
In the year of 1935, Decker decided to leave the dunes to become an artist for Civilian Conservation Corps.
With this new job, he was assigned to create his own representation or portrayal of the reconstruction of the buildings at historic Fort Churchill that was near Reno, Nevada. This included brick making, scaffolding, tools and equipment, and the men themselves.
By the end of 1935, Decker ended up living back in the dunes as the mysterious artist once again. In the time of June, 1946 Elwood married Ann Carpenter, who he met in the dunes, and they moved to Hollywood, California.
Elwood Decker"s interests extended to film making, writing and music, and spent much of his life in San Luis Obispo.
He worked in paint, ink, and pottery, and his style ranged over many schools of modern art: abstract, expressionist and impressionist, among others He was the subject of a biographical song by The Bobs. In the year of 1992, Elwood Decker was killed by a freight train while he was walking along the tracks that were in dunes of Oceano.
As in request of Elwood and Ann, both of their ashes were scattered together in a remote section of the dunes where they had first met over 40 years earlier.
