Rexford Elson Brandt was born in San Diego, California in 1914. A graduate of Riverside Polytechnic High School (1932), Riverside Junior College (1934), University of California at Berkeley (1936), he taught at Riverside Junior College, Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and at his Blue Sky Studio in Corona del Mar. Renowned for his watercolor paintings of the Southern California coast, Brandt wrote numerous books on technique and served as president of the California Water Color Society in the late 1940s. Along with his contemporaries Phil Dike, Emil Kosa, Jr., Barse Miller, Phil Paradise, George Post, Millard Sheets, Robert E. Wood and Milford Zornes, Brandt was known as a member of what has been variously called the California School, the White Paper Painters and the California Regionalists. Brandt and Phil Dike operated the Brandt-Dike Summer School of Painting, which began in the late 1940s, which in 1955 became the Rex Brandt Summer School and was again renamed in 1973 as the Brandt Painting Workshop.

Rex and Joan Malloch Irving married in 1938 in Riverside, California.

Joan Malloch Irving Brandt was born in Riverside, California in 1916. She attended Santa Barbara Girls’ School, Katharine Branson School, Riverside Junior College and Art Center School, Los Angeles. Along with her husband, she taught in the Brandt-Dike Summer School of Painting and was co-director of the Brandt Painting Workshop after 1973. She was a founding director of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, founding chairman of the Newport Beach Arts Commission, a life fellow of the American Watercolor Society and a life member of the Royal Society of Art.

Connection to LCAD – Rex Brandt was involved in designing the first two studios built for what was then named the Laguna Beach School of Art, located on the festival grounds in Laguna Beach, and he and fellow painter Phil Dike taught a workshop for the school in 1963 (the second year classes were offered). He also later served on the advisory board for the school and its endowment fund campaign in 1978.