By the late fifties Park had called a truce in the conflict between deep space and flat painting. His late paintings concentrate on human figures, singly or in small groups, in Daphne is one of a series of late paintings of nudes, single figures or small groups, sometimes identified as bathers by a beach or stream beyond. But though the background may evoke beach, forest or sky, it is seldom an insistent indicator of distance. Significantly a drawing that is evidently related to Daphne shows the figure isolated on a blank page with no surroundings at all.

Here the drama in Park’s work has shifted from space to volume. Bus Stop is about the space between objects more than it is about the objects themselves; Daphne is about a solidly constructed human figure defined by the forceful application of paint in broad slabs of color. Individual brushstrokes are much more insistent, and more massive, than they had been in Bus Stop. One feels that at this point in his career Park might have switched from painting to sculpture, working with ax and chainsaw at immense blocks of a splintery wood. It is probably no accident that this nude, whose limbs and torso have the strength of a branching tree, is placed next to an actual tree and named Daphne, the nymph who was transformed into a laurel tree.

Yet this is not a violent painting. Under the apparently crude brushwork it offers a surprisingly subtle characterization of form, much more refined than the drawing with its ham-fisted contours. If we call it primitive or savage, we should do so only in the original sense of the word savage: “being in a state of nature”. Like many of Park’s bathers, Daphne implies a kind of unity with nature that has been the subject of romantic longings in European and American thought ever since the eighteenth century.

Timothy Riggs

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