Master Rascal Foundation

About Us

Inspired by the lives of David Newcomer and Ben and Trude Burke, and by living artists of great achievement working in obscurity, we seek to educate people to the opportunities to enrich themselves by making their everyday lives works of art. We are incorporated as a non-profit public charity in Delaware. We are funded by donations and the sale of donated artwork.

About David Newcomer (1940-2014)

David Newcomer was known to some of his closest friends as "the master" for his wisdom and kindness and to others as "a rascal" for his mischievous and rebellious spirit.

He grew up in Illinois and was an avid athlete in his youth. David graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University with a B.A. in philosophy and studied at Drew University Theological School. He spent the summer of 1965 in work camps in what was then East Germany and Austria, at times secretly gathering with local people hungry to learn about the outside world. It was a seminal experience for David, opening up a generosity of spirit that would last a lifetime. He was ordained as an elder in the United Methodist Church in 1966.

He went on to become a campus minister at the Wesley Foundation at the University of Northern Iowa, where he became involved in the civil rights, anti-war, and women's movements. In 1969 David and his wife Meg, whom he had met at Drew and married in 1968, moved to the Bay Area to help co-direct Open End--an innovative program designed to foster a sense of community among Marin County families. He went on to receive his M.S.W. from UC Berkeley, and served as clinical director of various social service programs, devoting the last 25 years of his professional life to serving low-income seniors in San Francisco.

David was also a collector---of baseball cards, comic books, coins, postcards, temple bells, tea cups, and Chinese landscape paintings. But his greatest passion, besides his beloved wife Meg, was for Japanese gardens, which he visited and photographed for forty years. In his retirement years he wrote three books on the subject.

A lifelong student of world religions, David frequented both the Mount Tamalpais United Methodist Church and the San Francisco Zen Center at Green Gulch. In the end, David came to understand that although we don't get to choose what comes in our lives, we can choose how we meet it—hopefully with curiosity, an open heart, and a sense of gratitude.

What We're Up To

We are placing David Newcomer's book Public Japanese Gardens In The USA in libraries and cultural institutions. Institutions receiving David's books include:

- Dumbarton Oaks Research Library

- California State Library

- Lebanon (Oregon) Public Library

- Seattle Asian Art Museum Library

- University of Delaware's special collection on horticulture and landscape design.

- University of Washington Libraries

We are recruiting participants and developing curriculum for a project combining book arts with daily drawing or journaling to mount a show that considers the impact of looking at everyday life through the eyes of an artist.