Western datebook: Old man with a paint brush
IF ANY one life sums up the turbulence, potential and sheer beauty of the 20th century experience in the American West, it might be Fred Rochlin’s. Born in 1920s Arizona, Rochlin went on to become a leading Los Angeles architect, apprenticing with Lloyd Wright and Charles Eames and then founding his own firm Rochlin & Baran.
Apart from 2,000 projects that he helped build, with his wife, Harriet, he also documented the largely untold stories of Jews in the westward migration in their 1985 book “New Life in the Far West.”
After retirement as an architect, in 1998, Rochlin startled the world of performance art with his World War II memoir “Old Man in a Baseball Cap.”
Now, seven years after his death in 2002, yet another of Rochlin’s talents has been unveiled: Painting. A new exhibit, “Fred Rochlin Watercolors,” will be on show …