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About The Artist
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 California landscape painter Arturo Tello was born on December 5, 1954 in Tulancingo Hidalgo, a town near Mexico City. He began his formal training as a figure painter, but his innate feeling for the land drew him inexorably toward depicting the shifting light and natural forms of his adopted country's coastline and bluffs. His strong belief in the importance of preserving open spaces led him to help to form the Oak Group. Affiliated around the venerable Ray Strong, this group of landscape painting friends works to celebrate and preserve the natural environment through their paintings.
- favorite painter -
 Surrounded by art since his childhood in Mexico, Arturo used to go with his mother, Kasandra Martell and his older sister Griselda Tello on painting excursions with their friend and teacher Edgardo Coghlan. There were times when he and his sister Rosalba would model for a painting class, but as inspired as he was by the environment of these outings, he was too young to realize that Edgardo, the great teacher, was himself the student of the Spanish painter Jose Bardasano, a student of Marcelino Santamaria, who studied with Joaquin Sorolla, the Spanish master that in later years would become Tello's favorite painter.
- formal training -
 Arturo received his formal training at San Jose State University under the direction of professor Maynard Dixon Stewart, the son of Utah landscape painter LeConte Stewart and a student of Frank Vincent DuMond. LeConte Stewart named his son after his good friend, the legendary Maynard Dixon, painter and poet of the west. As fate or serendipity would have it, Ray Strong, who CO-founded the Oak Group with Tello in 1986, was also a friend and associate of Maynard Dixon. (They CO-founded the Art Students League of San Francisco in the 1930's) Strong also studied under Frank Vincent DuMond at the Art Students League in New York.
- memorable pilgrimage -
 Following college graduation, Arturo and Kasandra went on a memorable pilgrimage to every major museum in Europe. Because Arturo's training had focused on the techniques and philosophy of the old masters, on this trip they sought and enjoyed the work of Poussin, Caravaggio, Velazques, Murillo, Ingres and Rembrandt among others. They also visited the studio of Jose Bardasano, Edgardo Coghlan's old teacher who complimented Arturo's sketches and added a quick portrait of Arturo in the young artist's sketchbook as a memento of the visit. Maestro Bardasano died the next year in 1979. On a second trip, in 1983, Arturo had begun to paint outdoors so he was much more interested in looking at the work of painters like Sorolla, Van Gogh, Monet, Pissarro, Cezanne and Whistler among others.
- the spirit of the land -
 All through high-school and college Arturo competed in track and cross-country running events. (As did his brothers Jose Antonio and Juan Ramon.) As Arturo matured as an artist, his love of long distance running was slowly replaced with a passion for painting the landscapes that inspired him. He came to feel that the undeveloped areas that he favored for his long runs had an inherent vital force, a unique and fragile quality that would certainly be destroyed by development. "I realized that when you run outdoors, you're connecting very closely with the land," he once told a reporter, "with every breath you take its spirit is entering deeper into you." His mentor Ray Strong concurs: "Arturo took the landscape through his chest. His lungs would form words which come out on his canvases speaking to the spirit of the land."
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"The most basic truth regarding our Earth-home is that all living things, in some manner, are related to each other."