Frje Echeverria- Cedar Falls, Iowa

Born Detroit, Michigan, 1944. Soon after moved to Bethesda, Maryland where he spent his preschool years, including a surreptitious visit with his older brother to the yards outside the National Institute of Health, a few blocks from his house, where, climbing a fence, they visited and petted goats and other animals which had purportedly been near the atomic blast on Bikini Island in the Pacific.

1949, moved with his family to New Orleans, graduating from public school ,1962. At 16 he constructed a canvas and wood frame canoe from a kit sold by the Old Town company in New England, painted it with the then still rather new latex house paint, and he and a friend paddled it up the Amite river from Lake Ponchartrain, then got a ride in the back of a friendly stranger's pick up truck 10 miles over to Baton Rouge where they dropped the canoe into the Mississippi and steered it back down to New Orleans. Their idea was to remain in the canoe 24 hours a day, which they lived up to except for one night during the week long trip when they had rested on a dock on the Amite river.

In 1962 he started at Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd) where his interest in art was first piqued by a fellow student who described a class where the teacher "shows slides of art in a way that make us see things we have never seen." FPC was an incubator of intelligence, creativity, curiosity, and the discovery of one's own far-reaching connection to the world. frje awakened to the life of creative and thoughtful investigation. His art teachers Jim Crane, Robert Hodgell, and Peg Rigg were especially wise and creative; they fostered a rigorous, self directed, interactive unleashing of the artistic imagination. The core curriculum of the college centered on Western and Asian civilization, and the Judeo-Christian tradition. The entire college faculty was searchingly and inventively involved with understandings, probings, and celebrations of humanness, and with helping their students realize their own place in the connected, ongoing stream of human endeavor.

In his last months of graduate work at the University of Arkansas, where had been studying with, among others, David Durst, and Howard Whitlatch, he immersed himself in that nearly impossible task of finding a college teaching job in a field which for years had been, and continues to be, overly supplied with MFA graduates. After writing 200 letters which netted no encouraging results, he was invited to apply for and landed a one-year position at Buena Vista College in Storm Lake, Iowa. During the following August, with no prospects to teach in sight, a colleague at BV overheard a conversation in Ames where it was mentioned someone had just resigned from the art department at UNI; so by a stroke of fortune he was able to interview for and get that job. At UNI he was assigned to teach drawing, not his strong suit then, but he has made drawing and the teaching of drawing a special arena for the investigation of material, perception, intellectual understandings, and the kindling of creative awareness and making. Retired from university teaching in 2007, he lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

To purchase art work or for more information call: 319-266-0168, or email us at henrywmyrtle@cfu.net