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David Park Bus Stop, 1952 oil on canvas 36 x 34 in. When you grow older, it dawns on you that you are yourself--that your job is not to force yourself into a style, but to do what you want. I saw that if I would accept subjects, I could paint with more absorption, with a certain enthusiasm for the subject which would allow some of the esthetic qualities such as color and composition to evolve more naturally. With subjects, the difference is that I feel a natural development of the painting rather than a formal, self-conscious one.1 David Park Like many observant American painters in the late 1940s, David Park was attracted to Abstract Expressionism. But among those who took up the style seriously, few reacted against it so soon (after only a couple of years) or so violently (in 1949 he is said to have carried a studio-full of his abstract paintings to the Berkeley city dump and disposed of them with a bonfire). Park was to become the standard-bearer for what came to be known as “Bay Area figurative painting:” a movement that attempted to reconcile the brushwork and compositional strategies of Abstract Expressionism with the representation of the external world. A widely-accepted Abstract Expressionist precept was that painting should be the natural expression of the act of laying paint on a flat surface, without the illusion of a third dimension. In response, Park’s paintings of the early fifties often incorporate a wrestling match between flat “painting” and spatial “picture.” Broad swatches of paint emphasize the physical surface of the painting (at the same time that they mimic the abrupt light and shade of California sun), while dramatic perspective records deep space. Signs of distance (a small figure against a big one, for example) are contradicted by the absence of aerial perspective and by the integrity of distant objects. Bus Stop is a particularly sophisticated example of this phase of Park’s career. In the real world objects are constantly overlapping and obscuring parts of each other, but it is rare for what we see to be cut off at the edge by a rectangular frame. Even if I look out a window, I am likely to move close enough to it that the edges of the window-frame vanish at the periphery of my vision. In Bus Stop it is just the opposite: the frame bisects a car, fragments two men in the foreground, and cuts off distance and sky, but within this rectangle objects persistently resist overlapping. The vertical line of the curb slips neatly between the half-car at the left and the black mass of a walking man to the right, and at the bottom of the painting, instead of vanishing behind the car’s fender as it ought to, it defiantly skirts it. The “coach” sign and its pole maintain their integrity from the bottom edge of the canvas nearly to the top, and at the left an awning and its red arabesque are violently foreshortened but intact. In the distance a pedestrian is perfectly framed between sign and awning edge. Where overlapping does happen it is often obviously calculated and artificial: the distant figure is centered against the wheel of a car, and just to the right another car wheel is precisely divided by a pole. Park was hardly the first artist to play these tricks with shape and space. The Impressionists and their successors had learned them from Japanese prints. But the physicality of Park’s paint surfaces, thick and rough though flat, gives the game a new, athletic vigor. Timothy Riggs |