Born in the Bronx, New York in 1943.His mother taught him to paint, as she studied Art from the hospital for seven years. He completed his first landscape oil painting in 1954, for his godfather who gave him his first painting box, a good exchange.
George Welch began his studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, 1961. One year later he began his apprenticeship at the Queens Litho Corp. in the Graphics Department. He continued his Graphic Arts studies at Pratt and met John Chamberlain, whose work he admired. In three years, he became a full-time graphics Layout Artist in the Art department while continuing his studies at the Institute until 1965.
In 1965 George Welch decided to leave New York and continued his Art studies at Central State University, in Wilberforce Ohio. He decided not to enter the military. During this time, he worked on literary magazines, the school newspaper and became editor to the Fraternity Journal. And he began to focus on painting, jazz, poetry, Paris and the Harlem Renaissance.
Upon graduation in 1967, Welch became a Case Worker for the Department of Social Services in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. He continued to write poetry and to make art as he became more involved in the community arts movement. That same year he became a Substitute teacher in Brooklyn. In the summer of 1968 George decides to leave America for Paris, he travels throughout Europe starting in Amsterdam, staying with artist Sam Middleton, a good friend of Eric Dolphy who had just married a dancer. George and a friend decide to Trace the Black Sea of East Europe, stopping in Prague. Later the Adriatic Coast, the Mediterranean straits to the Riviera and south through the straits of Gibraltar on to North Africa.
When Welch returned to the States in1968 his application was accepted for the Urban Teacher Corps, through a Ford Foundation Grant to New York University.
In 1969 the Harlem Institute for Teachers based in The Bank Street College of Education continued the Ford Foundation Grant to complete his Graduate work in1970. He had been living in Greenwich Village as a teaching assistant and painting.
Welch began a studio-gallery in Chelsea-Clinton area of Manhattan called ‘Solution3’ In 1970.He worked there with his partner and invited community artists to show their works. From that point a vision began to take shape. An Eastern-Meditative view, the yin and yang or Taoist way, hence the third solution or ‘Solution3’ studio-Gallery. These were times of great challenge, change and opportunity. He visited friends in Tucson, and was taken by the openness, the desert sky’s and sunsets.
George started teaching at Pima College in 1971, the College Campus had just opened there in less than a year, from the Airport Hanger. It was a fresh start for everyone. The picture became clearer, images and paint were now in place, and this became a homecoming. The poetry took root here in the Tucson -Mountains for George, however the Greenwich-Village, Chelsea, of Manhattan remains in a bigger heart –vision, mixed with the Desert air.
