Author: Helen Park Bigelow File Type: pdf A half century after his death, David Park (1911-1960) is recognized as one of Americas most important twentieth-century painters. He was the first of the brilliant post-World War II generation of artists to break with Abstract Expressionisms hegemony and return to painting recognizable subjects, most powerfully the human figure. Parks original cohorts of Bay Area Figurative painters were his close friends Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Hassel Smith. All outlived himSmith by nearly fifty yearsand enjoyed recognition and fame during their lifetimes. Parks reputation is just now fully coming into its own. In David Park, Painter, Parks younger daughter, writer Helen Park Bigelow, paints a mesmerizing, deeply moving portrait of her fathers life and early, difficult death. Park left high school in New England without graduating and came west in order to paint. He married Lydia (Deedie) Newell when he was nineteen and was the father of two by the time he was twenty-two. We are brought into a family rich with moral conviction, ingenuity, smart and gifted friends, music, and art four complex people guided and inspired by values of integrity. Those same values guided and inspired David Parks painting. Yet this is much more than an artist biography. David Park, Painter is a skillful blend of memoir and observations about life in the Bay Area just before and just after World War II, when some of Americas most original, even radical, artists and writers gathered there. This close-up portrayal is unlike other accounts of artists. It is the story of a family built on the love and dedication of one man who held nothing back from his art, and of the spirit of the wife and daughters who supported him. Richard Armstrong, in reflecting on Parks generation of artists in his foreword to this beautiful book, observes that David Park, Painter is especially valuable as we persist in seeking to make real and human the commanding artistic figures. **Review Praise for *David Park, Painter* This clearly is a fresh, new take on painting from an author who knows Parks work from the beginning. I warn you once you start reading, you wont put this book down, absorbed by the intermixing trance of memory, of her intimate understanding of the art process, and her close stories that illuminateher fathersstrong character. Original deep insights enliven the readers experience of what it is to create honest beauty in this world. The text is juxtaposed with exquisite visual samples of David Parks work. I assign this book to my students. I want to assign it to the whole country.Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones and The Great Spring As if the colors took my gaze for a ride is how Helen Park Bigelow recalls her instinctive response to the paintings of her father David Parks brief abstract phase, while seeing, in likewise perfect accuracy, his better-known figurative works as heavy with being. The ride taken in Ms. Bigelows family memoir is fueled steadily by eloquence and wide sympathy, as well as just plain good storytelling. Thus is an intimate account of this important artist fleshed out with warm attentiveness to not just the development of the central character and his works but an entire milieu.Bill Berkson, author of Expect Delays and Homage to Frank OHara About the Author Helen Park Bigelow is the daughter of David Park, as well as a writer and potter. She and husband Edward B. Bigelow live in Hawaii, where she writes and teaches.