2 posts tagged “drawings”
I've been in the doldrums as far as painting goes. It's a familiar state of being to anybody who tries to paint and hold down a job at the same time. Anyway, to get myself back into the meridian I flipped through one of my favorite exhibit catalogues, the one for the Bay Area Figurative show back in the early Nineties.
The painters in this movement are for the most part less well-known; we sure didn't study them in our Art History survey courses. Richard Diebenkorn is about the only one you'll find frequently reproduced on calendars or postcards. They committed the ultimate heresy in mid-20th century art: they returned, after early careers spent mostly in abstract painting, to painting things which, well, looked like things.
Recall that at the time the Abstract Expressionist creed was at its height; in fact, figurative painting was considered kitschy and unexperimental. If you painted something recognizable, you were probably a pinko attempting earnest Social Realism, or the other extreme, a reactionary xenophobe dismissing abstraction as foreign claptrap. The story goes that the Diego Rivera mural at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), a monument of 1930's didactic figurative painting, proved embarrassing to the hip new director of the school, who concealed the mural behind a curtain.
These heretics didn't burn at the stake, but they faced hard times. David Park allegedly made ends meet designing product displays for liquor stores. Elmer Bischoff unloaded delivery trucks. Yet they lived in a Bay Area where even noncommercial artists could afford appropriate working spaces. Maybe it's not just the paintings I find so captivating and inspirational, but the dream of this story-book Bay Area in which I might have the inexpensive, roomy studio with the cavernous ceiling height, so that I can work on huge canvases with those heroically sized brushes I never purchase because they seem so out of proportion with my tiny, apartment-sized surfaces.
