Currently Reading
Elmer Bischoff: The Ethics of Paint
Aside from the black-turtleneck subtitle, this is a pretty good book about Mr. Bischoff, who along with David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, and others, was one of the Bay Area Figurative painters. Roughly, as I understand it, they took a few things they found useful from gesture painting and Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, Klein, those folks) and went back to painting people, which was oddly against the grain at the time.
His painting Orange Sweater was apparently where things started to gel, in 1955. (He was 39; as my 38th approaches, I find comfort in this.) I don't remember seeing it at the SFMOMA, but I'm sure this thumbnail doesn't do it justice; it's frickin' 4 by 4 and a half feet.
Here's a couple more of his pictures at the SFMOMA, here's some more at the Smithsonian, and here's a nice little bit about a retrospective curated by the book's author, Susan Landauer.
I was pointed to the Bay Area Figurative types a couple of years ago, by Jim Serchak, who now runs 66Balmy gallery. I'd sort of accidentally painted a good painterly picture of some boys running down a hill; he bought it and mentioned I should check out David Park. Park's another of the group (I mentioned him in this post, which generated a record 5 comments), but I wasn't able to find a book on him, and the library didn't have the Bay Area Figurative book mentioned above. So I ended up with this book on Mr. Bischoff, and in the process found not just one new-to-me painter that I think is the bee's knees, but two. Things just work out sometimes.
Aside from the black-turtleneck subtitle, this is a pretty good book about Mr. Bischoff, who along with David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, and others, was one of the Bay Area Figurative painters. Roughly, as I understand it, they took a few things they found useful from gesture painting and Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, Klein, those folks) and went back to painting people, which was oddly against the grain at the time.
His painting Orange Sweater was apparently where things started to gel, in 1955. (He was 39; as my 38th approaches, I find comfort in this.) I don't remember seeing it at the SFMOMA, but I'm sure this thumbnail doesn't do it justice; it's frickin' 4 by 4 and a half feet.
Here's a couple more of his pictures at the SFMOMA, here's some more at the Smithsonian, and here's a nice little bit about a retrospective curated by the book's author, Susan Landauer.
I was pointed to the Bay Area Figurative types a couple of years ago, by Jim Serchak, who now runs 66Balmy gallery. I'd sort of accidentally painted a good painterly picture of some boys running down a hill; he bought it and mentioned I should check out David Park. Park's another of the group (I mentioned him in this post, which generated a record 5 comments), but I wasn't able to find a book on him, and the library didn't have the Bay Area Figurative book mentioned above. So I ended up with this book on Mr. Bischoff, and in the process found not just one new-to-me painter that I think is the bee's knees, but two. Things just work out sometimes.
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