Yesterday, via @janet_bishop and the @sfmoma, a talk about David Park, the Bay Area figurative painter, gave new insights into his beautiful body of work (cut short by cancer). But: the most amazing part was that his daughter Helen, and Gretchen, the daughter of Richard Diebenkorn, his student, mentee and eventual best friend, also participated with first hand memories.

Like the fact that Helen called her parents by their first names, David and DeeDee (her name was Lydia). And the fact that a head of Lydia once had a self portrait of Park underneath.

The @kalamazooinstituteofarts, one stop on the Park exhibition tour, held a conference showing how much Park had influenced a number of important Black artists.

Because the artist died so young, his career has been in something of an eclipse. But if you ask any figurative painter (like Dana Schutz), often they will extoll his painting. He abandoned abstract expressionism when it was all the rage and went his own way, finding color, lush brushwork, impasto and humans more to his taste.
He painted from memory, not from photographs however. So there is something haunting and so very personal in each rendering.

Park himself was most famously photographed by his friend and renowned San Francisco portraitist Imogen Cunningham, with whom he traded a lovely portrait that captures her whimsical appearance.

The other thrill was that artist Wayne Thiebaud, now 100 years old, appeared live and spoke about how much he admired Park's work. You can perhaps see him up in the corner there as he spoke.