Milford Zornes

James Milford Zornes (January 25, 1908 – February 24, 2008) was an American watercolor artist and teacher.

Milford Zornes was born in rural western Oklahoma, a few miles from the small town of Camargo. His father found farming and stock raising in the area difficult, and when young Milford was seven moved the family to Boise, Idaho. Though his mother, a former schoolteacher, taught him to draw as a child, it was not until his late teens, when the family moved to California, that Zornes received any formal training in art when he attended his last year of secondary school at San Fernando High School.

After graduating from high school he decided to attempt a career in journalism, and began by selling photographs to various magazines, including Popular Science, Scientific American, and Popular Mechanics, and then received a few assignments to write articles. Advised that a journalist needed formal study, he moved to Santa Maria, California where he enrolled in what was then called Santa Maria Junior College. He then thought he might like to be an architect, and he moved to San Francisco to study engineering at Heald College. But he had difficulty with the math classes and had an urge to travel. He hitchhiked across the United States, and looked for work on ships out of various ports, finally getting a job as a seaman on a ship from New York to Copenhagen. He saw parts of Europe, including the Louvre and other art museums, but soon ran out of money and was helped back to the U.S. by an American Sailor’s Relief Society. Another seaman position got him back to California, now determined to be an artist.

He studied for a few months at the Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) under E. Roscoe Schrader. After a period of working in Arizona, he attended Glendale Junior College and then Pomona College, where he took classes from Millard Sheets at sister institution Scripps College.

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