Art :: Love :: Life
People cannot live without art, nor can they pursue art without life. Without life’s muses, an artist becomes a soul lost in a vacuum, aimless, barely moving. To fuse art, love, and life, to give oneself to the infinities of all three, is to begin a new journey, a path nearly unbeaten. To an adventurous pair, no journey could be more exciting.
When a person decides to become an artist, they begin a journey of self that is never-ending. When two people start a family together, they begin the creative process of love that is never-ending. So what happens when two artists decide to start a family? The ultimate collaboration. Two people, inspired by a passion for creation, engage with the greatest medium–life.
Ray and Miriam Rice met as art students at the Art Students League in New York City in the early 1940s. Ray served in WWII, while Miriam continued working in NYC until they married in 1942. At that point she began to travel with Ray as he was stationed around the US. Their first daughter, Mira Ellen, was born in New York in 1945, followed by Rachel Susan in 1948.
Unsettled after the war, they taught art at progressive private high schools – Putney in Vermont and Verde Valley in Arizona – interrupted by a huge adventure to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. They landed in the San Francisco Bay Area in California where their third daughter, Felicia May, was born in 1954.
Their lives in Northern California were rich. They explored multiple media and developed close communities of like-minded artists, writers, musicians, and fungiphiles. This site documents the trajectories of their work from their earliest through their final years. It is intended to be a living document that can be added to by those who knew and those who loved them.
I am Felicia’s son, one of three grandchildren, joining my brother, Gabriel Orion Schoonover, and cousin, Iana Té Porter (Mira’s daughter). As a musician, I am deeply grateful for the model set by my grandparents. I saw the consistent effort and care they brought to their craft. I learned to maintain my integrity as an artist and check my own moral compass constantly.
Love and art are indefinable. Many of us answer the call within ourselves to explore their nature however we can. While these realms lie beyond definition, there is something within their luminescence, a sense of the essential that we cannot ignore. What is it? How do we interact it with it? How do we inquire into it? How do we live and perhaps evolve through it?
Will Schoonover Rice
Oakland, CA