June Wayne - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Wayne was born in Chicago in 1918 to Dorothy Alice Kline and Albert Lavine, but the marriage ended shortly after Wayne's birth and she was raised by her single mother and grandmother. Wayne had aspirations to be an artist and dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen to pursue this goal. Although she did not have formal artistic training, she began painting and had her first exhibition at the Boulevard Gallery in Chicago in 1935. Only seventeen at the time, Wayne exhibited her watercolors under the name June Claire. She exhibited work again the following year at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. By 1938, she was employed as an artist for the WPA Easel Project in Chicago.

In 1939, Wayne moved to New York, supporting herself as a jewelry designer by day and continuing to paint in her time off. She married Air Force surgeon George Wayne in 1940, and in 1942 he was deployed to serve in the European theater of World War II. While George was in Europe, June first moved to Los Angeles and learned Production Illustration at Caltech, where she received training that helped her find work converting blueprints to drawings for the aircraft industry. She then moved to Chicago and worked as a writer for the radio station WGN, moving back to Los Angeles with George when he returned to the united States in 1944. The couple divorced in 1960, but the artist continued to use "June Wayne" as her professional identity for the rest of her life.

When World War II ended, Wayne returned to Los Angeles and became an integral part of the California art scene. While continuing to paint and exhibit, she took up lithography in 1948 at Lynton Kistler’s facility, initially producing lithographs based on her paintings and then developing new imagery in her lithographs. In the late 1950s, Wayne traveled to Paris to collaborate with French master printer Marcel Durassier, first on lithographs illustrating the love sonnets of English poet John Donne and then on an artist's book also based on Donne's poetry. Wayne ultimately produced 123 copies of the finished book, one of which gained Wayne the support of Wilson MacNeil "Mac" Lowry, director of the arts and humanities programs at the Ford Foundation.