David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back by Helen Park Bigelow

Description

At the height of Abstract Expressionism, he went back to the figure — and changed American art. In the early 1950s, Bay Area painter David Park did the unthinkable: he returned to painting people. His bold, sensuous canvases of bathers, musicians, and friends — laid on with a palette knife in thick, juicy color — helped launch the Bay Area Figurative Movement.

David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back (Counterpoint Press, 2015) is the intimate biography by Park’s younger daughter, writer Helen Park Bigelow. Drawing on family memories, letters, and her father’s own words, Bigelow paints a mesmerizing portrait of a brief but remarkably prolific career — Park died in 1960 at just forty-nine — and of the bohemian Bay Area world he inhabited, illustrated with more than ninety plates tracing his development from early abstractions to mature figurative masterpieces.

Bigelow writes with tenderness, awe, and unflinching honesty about a father who held nothing back — in his art or his life. For lovers of modern American painting, this is essential reading.

In the early 1950s, at the height of Abstract Expressionism’s reign, Bay Area painter David Park did the unthinkable: he returned to the figure. His bold, sensuous canvases of bathers, musicians, and friends — painted with a palette knife in thick, juicy color — helped launch the Bay Area Figurative Movement and changed American art.
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nDavid Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back (Counterpoint Press, 2015) is the intimate biography by Park’s younger daughter, writer Helen Park Bigelow. Drawing on family memories, letters, and her father’s own words, Bigelow paints a mesmerizing portrait of a brief but remarkably prolific career — Park died in 1960 at just forty-nine — and of the bohemian Bay Area world he inhabited.
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nIllustrated with more than ninety plates tracing his development from early abstractions to the mature figurative masterpieces, the book is the first full-length study of this important American artist in two decades. Bigelow writes with tenderness, awe, and unflinching honesty about a father who held nothing back — in his art or his life.
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nFor lovers of modern American painting, this is essential reading: the story of an artist who followed his own vision, whatever the fashion of the moment.