I was asked to write an essay about a painting i loved last fall, and this came to mind, seen at the marvelous and long overdue retrospective of Park’s work at SFMOMA, a bright spot in the otherwise blighted year that was 2020. It was published elsewhere initially, but now i’m able to share it here with you. Enjoy.
In my student days, I had a pretty academic training in painting, and I can remember, near graduation, having a revelation in front of one of the David Park paintings at the Oakland museum. At the time I was attached to very illustrative ideas of ‘good’ or ‘correct' drawing and painting, etc, and was beginning to find the closer I approached ‘realism’, the less I felt it had a sense of poetry or deeper feeling. Not that such painting couldn’t carry such things, just that I was definitely not getting there in my own work.
Anyway, the Park painting was one of musicians, a jazz band, from the 40s, and I had this realization standing before it—Park had gone far beyond the specifics of how the scene literally looked on the eye, and achieved a portrait of how that light and space FELT. It was digested, transmuted, amplified, in the translation into painted mark. His color, his paint, his aggressive simplification, his design, all contributed, without being flashy, and the painting just reeked of particular experience, spoken of clearly and wordlessly through color and surface and mark. Park’s painting always has this deep sense of humility and innocence and joy in it, and yet never is cockeyed, sentimental, or lacking in depth.
Park had powerfully told me where the strength of painting lay—that it was all about finding a painted equivalent, an abstract mark, that conveyed a real sensation. And that there were real possibilities there, with real depth, in painting figuratively with a modern sense of paint handling and abstraction and surface. Bischoff and Debenkorn showed that as well in equally compelling ways, but I think it is very hard to overstate the depth of Park’s influence on his friends…His return to figuration and rejection of abstraction proved historically significant to broad audiences, but perhaps most profoundly in his influence on his fellow painters.
The story of Park taking all his abstract work to the dump is famous, and in his daughter’s book, he was quoted as saying, in 1953, “I was concerned with big abstract ideals like vitality, energy, profundity, warmth. They became my gods. They still are. I disciplined myself rigidly to work in ways I hoped might symbolize those ideals. I still hold those ideals today, but I realize that those paintings practically never, even vaguely, approximated any achievement of my aims. Quite the opposite. What the paintings told me was that I was a hard-working guy who was trying hard to be important”.
The experience I had in front of that earlier painting decades ago was magnified in depth at the David Park Retrospective at San Francisco MOMA last year. His empathy and connection with his figures were a welcome tonic during the isolation and horror of the pandemic. Not only that, but he had also deepened incredibly as a painter by the 1950s, and the retrospective had much of his late great work. This small painting, of his wife, Lydia, reading by lamplight, embodies everything I’ve come to admire so deeply in his work. The conviction that daily life, deeply felt, is more than enough, is very important to me.
Vitality, energy, profundity, warmth. Indeed. How he succeeds in a painting like this. It’s brilliant beyond words in embodying all that, and without the grandiosity that seemed all too mandatory then, hell, even now. In his late paintings especially, his grasp of traditional technique, and how to get sparkle and complexity in huge slabs laid down with a 6 inch wide brush had become absolutely formidable, and I found the small scale and quietude of this painting so deeply moving. The technique holds great nuance and boldness simultaneously. The evocation of light and memory is pitch perfect, each mark perfectly tuned to the next in a high wire act completely free of angst.
A quiet moment of light. I could happily go on at length discussing how exquisite all the formal choices are, that build this painting, the clarity of decision, light, form, absolutely distilled, purified. The pearlescent quality of his light, his flesh, that reminds you of the complicated and subtle surface of a renaissance painting, built in layers… But it is not translucent, this is all heavy, wet, thick paint, slurred and dripping and yet it glows... Anyone who cares to look can see that, but they lose so much in reproduction, no matter how faithful. What is remarkable to me is that Park was able to paint it, and I’m so grateful he did, and that this incredible painter is getting more of the recognition that he is so clearly and deeply deserving of. I was immensely grateful for the exhibition and the opportunity to have a long look at so much of his late work, it was nothing short of life-affirming.
