david park

David Park (1911-1960) was part of the post-WWII alumnae of the San Francisco Art Institute (then the California Art School). He revived an interest in figurative art, at first experimenting with still-abstracted forms that relied on colour for their impact, dynamics and warmth. Park, along with Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, broke away from the philosophy of painting promoted by Clyfford Still, who taught at the Institute, and forming what would later be called the Bay Area Figurative School. Their influence may be seen in the work of later Bay Area Figurative School artists such as: Paul Wonner, Nathan Oliveira, and Joan Brown.

While these painters started out painting in what was called an objective style, deploying abstract shapes in large space, they soon migrated to using the physical world and representative subjects to experiment with shape, color, texture and temperature in their painting. Park realized that concentrating on principle and abstraction drew attention to the painter rather than the painting. He felt it was important to focus on the present, to develop responses to nature. "I believe that we are living at a time that overemphasizes the need of newness, of furthering concepts".

Park worked with figurative painting from about 1950 until about 1959 when he became ill with cancer. He started out painting what he saw, kids playing in the street, musicians, his friends, people in their houses, and later painting the classical studio nudes and bathers, subjects of the French impressionists. After he become too ill to work with oils, he continued working with watercolors which he produced until his early death in 1960.

He had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1988-89.