Don Van Dall of Boulder Colorado passed away peacefully on Feb 11, 2021 at the age of 90.  He leaves behind four children — Leslie Friedman, Dirk Van Dall, Kristin Ladd, and Amanda Van Dall.

Don was born in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1930 to father John Van Dall and mother Lawana Van Dall. He attended Washington and Lee University, and ultimately transferred to the University of Oklahoma to obtain a degree in geology and oil and gas law. There he married Phyllis Perry and had three children.

Don was an attorney for First National Bank in Newport Beach, California, But ultimately returned to Oklahoma, where he accepted a position with Mobil Oil.

As the new legal counsel for Mobil’s Libyan exploration efforts, Don moved to Tripoli in 1968 with his family. Subsequently, the family was transferred to Singapore, and after a divorce and marriage to Tanny Riana, Don lived in Jakarta before returning to Wichita as an attorney for Koch Industries. After a few years, Don became an independent oil wildcatter, moving to Taos, New Mexico, where his fourth child, Amanda, was born, followed by years in Casper and Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Don was a committed and prolific oil painter for his adult life. Influenced by Expressionist figurative painters such as Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Oscar Kokoschka, Don favored large canvases with unflinching emotional interpretations of the human figure, most often the female form. Broad gestural brush strokes often framed women in extremes of emotion— laughter, anger, passion—while other canvasses were more tempered lyrical abstractions of our natural world.

Don remained a hipster into old age, keeping him engaged in our world’s affairs. It was a key ingredient keeping him sharp til the very end of his life.

Though singular and often solitary, Don was warm and expansive to those close to him. A whip-smart, opinionated, bon-vivant globe trotter, he nonetheless found serenity in his later years with his family and his painting. It is our profound hope that he still has his finger on the world’s pulse and that with his head in the clouds, he is interpreting an image of the afterlife on a giant, gold-framed canvas in the Cosmos…

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