| Maker(s): | Park, David
| | Culture: | American (1911 - 1960)
| | Title: | House on Santa Barbara Road, Woman Reading
| | Date Made: | 1952
| | Type: | Drawing
| | Materials: | watercolor and ink on thin cream-colored paper
| | Place Made: | United States
| | Measurements: | sheet: 17 3/4 in x 12 in; 45.1 cm x 30.5 cm
| | Accession Number: | SC 2012.1.15
| | Credit Line: | Gift of The Pokross Art Collection, donated in accordance with the wishes of Muriel Kohn Pokross, class of 1934 by her children, Joan Pokross Curhan, class of 1959, William R. Pokross and David R. Pokross Jr. in loving memory of their parents, Muriel Kohn Pokross, class of 1934 and David R. Pokross
| | Museum Collection: | Smith College Museum of Art
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Label Text:
“I have found that in accepting and immersing myself in subject matter I paint with more intensity and that the “hows” of painting are more inevitably determined by the “whats.”
– David Park
Abstraction grew as a major aesthetic force in American painting through the 1940s and 1950s, becoming the dominant mode of image-making on both the east and west coasts. During the early 1950s, however, a renewed interest in realist-based painting emerged among a group of artists working in San Francisco. David Park was at the forefront of what came to be known as “Bay Area Figuration.” In 1949, after two decades of producing increasingly abstract paintings, Park suddenly disposed of all of his non-objective works and began to paint from the model. He reasoned that many non-objective paintings “seem . . . to be so visually beautiful that I find them insufficiently troublesome, not personal enough.”
This watercolor shows a seated woman reading (probably Park’s wife, Lydia). It is painted in bold strokes and flat planes and rendered in saturated colors. The compressed space is expressively delineated using watercolor and ink (of particular note is the use of drybrush lines to form the table and chair legs and establish spatial effects).
Park left his teaching position at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1952, the same year the house he and his family had been renting on Santa Barbara Road in Berkeley was destroyed in a mudslide. Shortly thereafter Park executed a series of watercolors entitled “House on Santa Barbara Road,” which may have been done from memory.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+2012.1.15 |
