P – Z – Page 3

David Park

1911-1960

Theme/Style – Modernism, Social Realism, Abstract Expressionism, figurative art

Media – Oils, watercolors, murals

Artistic Focus – Considered by many to be the first California new figurative painter, David Park was “the first non-objective artist here to feel that the great international divide in the watershed of abstraction had been reached––the beginning of an American ‘post-abstract’ period.” And yet others say that Park’s career “is not the story of a switch from abstract to figurative; it is a complicated, fluctuating interplay of the two.” In addition to the use of linear contours and shapes as a means of expression, Park’s early work, in the period from 1930 to 1945, reflects his belief that the human form is the most interesting object to paint. Prior to gaining widespread fame for his authoritative works of the 1950s, he experimented with lyrical genre scenes, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.

Career Highlights –

In 1930, he served as an assistant to Ralph Stackpole during the creation of the monumental sculptures adorning the front of the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco.
In 1944, he taught at the California School of Fine Arts. In 1955, Park joined the faculty of UC Berkeley.
Park’s works often demonstrate a use of paint as the “subject,” as an “oozing, unstable, constantly moving plastic liquid mass”; the use of natural, organic forms or shapes; a highly developed concept of the function of color; and a distinctive concept of space that was either “expanding” or “centrifugal” in nature.
His career was cut short by a diagnosis of terminal cancer.
His last works were gouaches infused with Park’s customary “vitality, profundity, energy and warmth: his ‘gods’.”

Emmy Lou Packard

1914-1998

Theme/Style – Social Realism, Modernism

Media – Oils, murals, graphic arts, photography, prints, drawings

Artistic Focus – Emmy Lou Packard was known as much for her pursuit of environmental and feminist causes, civil rights, animal rights and political populism as she was for her art. As one exhibitor commented, “Her life and work define her not only as a Californian, but as an American and a citizen of the world.”

Career Highlights –

Thanks to her father’s work as a California farming official, Packard went with her family to Mexico as a teen. There, her mother arranged for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo to view the young girl’s sketches, and it was their encouragement that propelled Packard toward a career in art.
Packard studied first at the University of California, Berkeley, and following her first husband’s death, she undertook graduate studies of sculpture and fresco, determined to build a career to support their infant son.
She became an assistant on Rivera’s Golden Gate Exposition mural project,
Spent a year in Mexico working with Rivera and Kahlo, and came back to San Francisco with some 40 watercolors that served to announce her professional arrival.

Claibourne Randolph Tatum

1913-1988

Theme/Style – Figurative art

Media – Oils, murals

Artistic Focus – Little is known about the body of Clay Randy Tatum’s work. He seemed to prefer the figure, painting scenes of sportsmen and workers earlier in life, and portraits later in life.

Career Highlights –

Born in San Francisco in 1913, Claibourne Randolph Tatum studied at the California School of Fine Arts in the 1930s.
In 1936, Tatum was a member of Frank Van Sloun’s painting crew for large murals in the rotunda of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, and he assisted Diego Rivera on his murals at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939.
Tatum’s religious beliefs led to his imprisonment for draft evasion at McNeil Island prison in 1945. Six years later, a serious auto accident left him depressed and with stiff hands which made future painting difficult.
During the 1950s Tatum lived in Marin County, where he made a living doing portrait commissions. He spent his last years in Los Angeles, passing away in 1988.

Sueo Serisawa

1910-2004

Theme/Style – Impressionism, Modernism, Regionalism, Expressionism, Abstraction,
still lifes, portraits

Media – Oils, watercolors, lithographs

Artistic Focus – Serisawa’s early works were romantic – still lifes and portraits painted in a style influenced by classic European art. His work up to 1941 had a decidedly Modernist, even Regionalist flair. But history – both personal and political – intervened, as Serisawa later returned to his Asian roots and began painting in an abstract style influenced by the teachings of Zen philosophy, Oriental culture, and the structure and form offered in his study of calligraphy.

Career Highlights –

Born in Japan, Sueo Serisawa moved to Seattle in 1918 to join his father, painter Yoichi Serisawa, and began painting at age 8 with his father’s guidance.
Serisawa later studied art under George Barker, as well as at the Otis Art Institute and the Art Institute of Chicago.
On the day that his one-man show opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, America was plunged into war; the date was December 7, 1941.
The subsequent internment of Japanese-Americans sent the Serisawa family to New York City, to avoid confinement. As difficult as that time was, Serisawa later said that his time in New York was a significant influence on his development as an artist.
Later in his career, Serisawa taught art at Scripps College, the Laguna Beach School of Art and the Palm Springs Museum of Art.
Serisawa’s works are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.

A. G. (Achilles) Rizzoli

1896-1981

Theme/Style – Architectural renderings and “portraits,” fantasy landscapes and cityscapes, signage

Media – Watercolor, ink, graphite

Artistic Focus – Working as an architectural draftsman for nearly 40 years, A.G. Rizzoli’s personal artistic journey was a very private one; and his work was not seen by the general public until after his death. He produced a body of architectural renderings in grand Beaux-Arts style, many of which were intended as symbolic portraits of friends and family, depicting them as buildings.

Career Highlights –

Achilles (A.G.) Rizzoli was born in Point Reyes, California in 1896. He had little formal education, but from the age of 16 to 19 he attended Oakland’s Polytechnic College of Engineering.
Rizzoli lost his father to suicide in 1915, and around that time he moved to San Francisco, developing his drafting skills as a member of the San Francisco Architecture Club. In 1923 he began writing short stories and novellas about the “boys” in the club, culminating in his self-published The Colonnade in 1933, for which he used the pen name “Peter Meter-maid.”
Rizzoli worked as a draftsman at the San Francisco architectural firm O.H. Deichmann, while in his spare time creating a vast body of work comprising numerous meticulously detailed drawings of his secret world, including portraits of his coworkers and neighbors in the form of buildings surrounded by cryptic, whimsical, pun-filled inscriptions.
In the mid-1930s Rizzoli produced another body of drawings for development of his fantasy “expeau.” Inspired by the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, the “expeau” was called Y.T.T.E. (Yield to Total Elation), and along with plot plans the drawings included signs and emblems for its buildings.
Never married, Rizzoli shared a home with his mother until her death in 1937. A group of his birthday tributes to her, called The Kathedrals, comprises some of his most elaborate architectural portraits; it was followed by another group of artworks containing Mother’s Day poems to her after her death.
In 1958 Rizzoli began filling large sheets of architectural vellum with poetry, prose, architectural drawings, and quotations. Sometimes serving as a commemoration of a local or historical event, the 350 sheets make up what Rizzoli called the A.C.E. (Amte’s Celestial Extravaganza). Included in Rizzoli’s drawings were words he created in his own private language, such as “Amte,” standing for “Architecture Made To Entertain.”
A.G. Rizzoli passed away in 1981, five years after he suffered a stroke while working on a sheet from his A.C.E. series called Rest in Peace Awhile.
Throughout his life as an artist, Rizzoli worked in near-obscurity, holding small annual exhibitions of his work in his home, attended only by his fellow employees, neighbors and the occasional visitor. Nearly a decade after his death, Rizzoli and his artworks were discovered by Bonnie Grossman, owner of the Ames Gallery in Berkeley, California, when some of Rizzoli’s drawings were found and offered to her for sale. Impressed and intrigued, Grossman located Rizzoli’s great-nephew, who had inherited Rizzoli’s complete and extensive oeuvre, including not only his drawings but also handmade books and poems.
Ms. Grossman brought Rizzoli and his work into the spotlight, and a solo show called “A.G. Rizzoli: Architect of Magnificent Visions” took place at the San Diego Museum of Art in 1997 and traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of American Folk Art in New York, among other venues.

Selection of Works by this Artist

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Manuel Tolegian

1911-1983

Theme/Style – Portraits, landscapes, still lifes, interiors, illustration

Media – Oils, murals

Artistic Focus – An artist with important ties to mid-century contemporary art, Manuel Tolegian began as a Social-Realist painter during the 1930s, and painted social protest scenes. Later in life he specialized in realistic still lifes and portraiture. His association with important artistic luminaries impacted his art, exemplified by the portrait he painted of movie and television star Cesar Romero.

Career Highlights –

Manuel Jerair Tolegian was born in Fresno, California, in 1911. At age nine he moved to Los Angeles, where his first art studies were at Manual Arts High School under Frederick Schwankovsky. Two of his fellow students were Philip Guston and Jackson Pollock.
Tolegian and Pollock subsequently left Los Angeles together for New York City, where they shared studios and attended The Art Students League, studying first under Thomas Hart Benton and later with John Sloan, John Steuart Curry, and George Grosz.
During the 1930s Tolegian and Pollock made several trips between New York and Los Angeles together, first as hitchhikers, and then, as their artistic fortunes improved, via Tolegian’s automobile.
Tolegian exhibited at San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939. By the early 1940s Tolegian had returned permanently to live in Los Angeles.
During World War II Tolegian was a correspondent in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, and did a series of paintings of Army nurses at Camp White, Oregon.
A boyhood friend of writer William Saroyan,Tolegian wrote the folk music for Saroyan’s Pulitzer prize-winning play The Time of Your Life, and his book illustrations include Dinner at Omar Khayyam’s and The Dove Brings Peace.
After the war Tolegian settled in Sherman Oaks, California, where he remained until his death in 1983.