In 1947, Joseph and Dorothy Kushner’s cross-country trip to meet each other’s relatives brought them from New York to El Monte, California. They lived temporarily with Dorothy’s sister and brother-in-law, Sylvia and Carroll Soll and their children. California, filled with orange trees, cacti and palms, must have seemed like paradise to them, particularly during the mild winters. Before long, they purchased Euclid Furs, a retail fur shop in Pasadena, and a house in Altadena, California. “And so when Joe and I got married and we came to California, I wanted to decorate the showroom…I did the copper work and it was all hanging in the showroom. …But I didn’t paint at all for quite a while and I don’t know why. I just didn’t have the urge to paint. “ She worked on a series of copper repoussé wall plaques that decorated the fur shop.
In addition to keeping house and helping with the fur business, she also kept busy designing fur carpets in the style of Piet Mondrian. Joe’s brother Aaron, living with them at this time, liked the work of Mondrian and they all became interested in these simplified geometric compositions. Dorothy got books about Mondrian from the library and drew designs for Joe to execute in dyed mouton fur. They attempted to retail these fur area carpets in the Los Angeles department stores and even took out an ad in the New Yorker to promote them. To no avail.
The Altadena house provided Dorothy with her first proper studio room since her Kansas City years. “The second floor is one large room surrounded by windows with the mountain view. There I sew, paint, etc. and we also have couches for a guest room.” And guest room it was. In short order, Joe’s younger brother Aaron, who suffered from asthma, joined them from Brooklyn to try out California’s more salubrious climate. He was followed by two other brothers and Dorothy’s mother-in-law. With this crowd, and being a newlywed, it would have been difficult to start up work in earnest again. In 1949, her son Robert was born.“But after you [Robert] were born, suddenly there was a great urge, a surge of creativity, and then I began to paint again.” And paint, she did.
Dorothy never dated any of her work since she did not want potential clients to know which were older and which were newer pieces. Consequently, her exact sequence of paintings is a matter of conjecture. Her earliest California pieces were freely painted watercolors continuing her Kansas City work—but with a new vigor and panache.
She studied with James Couper Wright, a leading West Coast watercolorist. He taught a group in one of the parks. Dorothy’s work followed Wright’s lead: larger format, stronger colors, strong black lines, bolder composition. In contrast to her suburban idyllic home surroundings, for her art, she favored grittier local locales such as oil wells, gravel pits and other industrial locations. She also painted the picturesque barns and rural, old California buildings which were rapidly disappearing due to development. And she loved to paint the San Gabriel Mountains, which were visible outside her Altadena studio windows.