David Park (March 17, 1911 – September 20, 1960)[1] was an American painter and a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative Movement in painting during the 1950s.
Biography
David Park was born in Boston, the son of Mary Turner and Charles Edward Park. His father was a Unitarian minister.[2] He attended the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor Connecticut and was recognized for his early talent by the sculptor Evelyn Longman Batchelder, the headmaster's wife.
He moved to Los Angeles at the age of 17, staying with his aunt Edith Park Truesdell who was an artist, so he could study at Otis Art Institute in 1928.[2] A year later, he moved to Berkeley where he married Lydia Newell in 1930, and with whom he had two daughters, Natalie and Helen. His first solo show was in 1933 at the Oakland Art Gallery.
Although 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 that 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. Usually working from memory,[4] he initially painted what he saw: kids playing in the street, musicians, his friends, people in their houses. Toward the end of the decade he painted classical studio nudes and bathers in a monumental style. After he became too ill to work with oils, he continued working with watercolors which he produced until his early death in 1960, at the age of 49, of cancer. Park was working at the University of California as an Associate Professor of Art up until he died.[5] He was painting his best works in the final years of his life and career.[6]
^ abcBoas, Nancy. “David Park and George Staempfli: A Painter and His Dealer.” Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 54, no. 1, 2015, pp. 46–62. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/683150.