Violin and Cello
1939
David Park was an American painter best known for his involvement in the Bay Area Figurative Movement along with Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. Park?s work in particular explored the human body and its relationship with its surroundings, which he investigated through portraits, crowds, and people conversing with one another. ?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,?? he once explained. Born on March 17, 1911 in Boston, MA, he went on to study at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles before moving to the Bay Area where he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Park and his peers were inspired by the advent of Abstract Expressionism in New York and after engaging with the style themselves, brought the same energy and painterly elements to depict of figures, landscapes, and still life. In 1959, the artist stopped working after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Park died on September 20, 1960 in Berkeley, CA. Today, his works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.