Fig. 18. Beach Ball, c. 1936–40 Oil on canvas, 35¾ × 26 in. (90.8 × 66 cm.) Private collection
ON A SUNNY DAY IN OCTOBER 1941, we walked up a steep, zig-zagging driveway from Santa Barbara Road in Berkeley to see a just-vacant house that was for rent. “Forty bucks a month,” David had said. “It’s damaged, but who cares.” Deedie and David were thirty, Nat ten, and I was eight.
On either side of the driveway we passed redwood trees and enticing places to explore. Suddenly David stopped, staring ahead at a spreading bush with large purple flowers on its branches. He shook his head and said, “Oh, Christ, that color.” The way he said it made me look again at the flowers and see a purple that was alive and bright and shiny, a light color but at the same time deep, and good enough to eat.
A moment later it was Deedie who stopped, pointing. “Look,” she said. Half hidden by trees just above a massive boulder sat the house, two stories with a porch along the front and a garage underneath. We climbed cracked concrete stairs past terraced flowerbeds crowded with weeds. We’d been told to walk right in. No one had a key to the house because the doors couldn’t shut tightly enough to lock.
David reached for the doorknob and pushed. The door opened with such a screech that we all jumped, and he burst out laughing. But inside, we became silent as we passed through a broad front hall into the main part of the house with its gleaming wooden floors. I remember the echo of our footsteps as we walked through empty rooms.
“Ohhh,” said Deedie, crossing to a window that took up most of the living room wall. Outside, over the tops of trees and across the roofs of Berkeley, San Francisco Bay sparkled silver in the sunlight. Directly across the water stretched the Golden Gate Bridge, and beyond it the glimmer of ocean. To the left of the bridge the city sprawled over its hills, and on the right side the slopes of Mount Tamalpais rose in a long green profile.
Nat and I hurried off to explore and soon entered the garage. There we found a tiny trickle of water meandering creek-like across the floor and out to the driveway. We traced it upstream where it oozed through green mossy edges and disappeared in the dank underbelly of the house. “A creeklet,” said Nat.
“Let’s go tell,” I said, and back inside we found our parents in the living room designating spaces with their arms out this way and that: “The couch there facing the fire-place, and maybe a big chair here . . .” David pointed to the top of the mantel and said to notice how out-of-plumb it was. “The whole place is slipping down the hill,” he said proudly, and Deedie was talking about how beautifully the redwood walls would show off the paintings, the ones shipped out from Boston and the ones yet to be painted.
“Don’t you girls want to pick out your bedrooms?” Deedie asked.
Bedrooms, with an s? We flew upstairs, forgetting all about the little creek in the basement. Nat and I both chose rooms with windows facing the Bay. Deedie and David picked a large corner bedroom with its own bathroom, separated by a hall door from the rest of the house. And we’d have a guest room, for when people came to stay. Through friends, David had just acquired a large studio over a dime store in downtown Berkeley, a place with an entire north wall of windows. It was to be the first time in my life my father hadn’t painted in a corner of the living room or in what was supposed to be the dining room.
Deedie and David scattered our Navajo rugs on the hardwood floors, hung paintings on the redwood walls, and placed the couch just right. It, and a matching chair, were David’s creations. Low to the floor and angular, both pieces of furniture looked as if they had come right out of a painting by Picasso.
Deedie put a mattress on the sunny veranda, and whenever she was home and the weather permitted, she went outside in a red silk kimono, shrugged it off and flopped down naked, drowsing in the sun. She sewed curtains with an old Singer treadle machine, put flowers on the piano and a bowl of fruit on the dining room table. On the coffee table went the stack of art books, including the series of Skira monographs, clothbound volumes with tipped-in color plates, books on Degas, Van Gogh, Piero della Francesca, Renoir, Picasso, the Etruscans.
In our rooms, Nat and I could lie under our covers and look up at the stars. Nat came to realize she had a favorite star, the middle one in Orion’s belt. She named him Charlie George and told him everything. I was wildly jealous, never having thought to pick a favorite star. We both had prints on our walls, gifts from David. Nat’s was a chair by Van Gogh, mine a jungle by Rousseau.
Now that we were in our wonderful big house, Deedie and David stepped right back into their Berkeley life with the friends they had missed so desperately during our Boston years. Once again our house became a central place in the circle of people around my parents, with David the center of the circle. The minute he walked into the room, the whole place perked up, as if the air itself brightened.
David had a deep, captivating voice. He paused frequently to search for just the right word. All of us there with him would fall still and wait, watching him intently. No one ever suggested a word. We wanted his word, not ours. In an interview long after David died, Deedie said, “I always thought that when he spoke it was apt to have a different tang than the straight thing that you’d expect. Not being funny, or anything like that, just—original.”
In the late fall of 1941, after we moved into our crooked house, Nat and I entered sixth and fourth grades at the local grammar school, Deedie learned typing and shorthand so she could get a decent job, and again David taught classes in painting and drawing at the University of California’s Extension Division. When he brought a new painting home from his studio, he hung it over the fireplace so he could study it. Sometimes he decided it was finished, and sometimes he took it back to the studio for more work. Once when I was downtown being taken to a movie with a girlfriend and her mother, David drove by in the Gray Goose, its top down and a painting jutting out of the open rumble seat.
Fig. 19. Violinist, c. 1936–40 Oil on canvas, 21½ × 27½ in. (54.6 × 69.9 cm.) Private collection
Outside the dining room of the house on Santa Barbara Road, a lawn curved off in a semi-circle, bordered by a flowerbed crowded with primroses and weeds. After breakfast on Sunday, December 7th, a few weeks after we moved into the house, Deedie and David and I went outside to weed. Nat was upstairs in the shower.
The Philharmonic was on the radio, the window open so we could hear. We were kneeling on the damp grass a few feet from each other, working and not talking. Music from the radio poured into the air. A satisfying muddy heap of weeds lay at my side as I left flower after flower fully open to light and sun. For me, this encapsulated moment is colored by primroses, hot pink and yellow, blue, orange, magenta.
The music stops. “We interrupt this broadcast,” a man says, and the way Deedie and David turn to each other rivets me. We stand up, looking at the opened window, listening.
Then we’re inside. Deedie interrupts Nat’s shower and tells her to come downstairs. David bends over the dining room table, where our atlas now lies spread open. The voice on the radio still talks.
David points at Japan, Hawai’i, San Francisco. Trying to reassure us, he says it’s a hell of a big ocean. The man on the radio reports that if they—the airplanes and bombs—are coming, they’ll arrive here in California in a few hours. We look out at the ocean and the far-off sky. In the foreground, in the curving flowerbed, primroses droop, too abruptly parted from their cool, weedy shelter.
Because he was over thirty and a father, David was not eligible for the draft. Within weeks after December 7th, his brothers Dick and Ted enlisted and entered officers’ training—Dick in the Navy, Ted in the Army Air Corps. David served throughout the war in a defense plant, General Cable Corporation, in nearby Emeryville. He operated a crane during the long hours of the graveyard shift, from midnight to eight in the morning. That gave him a few daylight hours to paint.
Deedie worked at the University of California Press, from eight-thirty until five. The house was gray and cold when Nat and I arrived home from school each day. Upstairs, David lay sleeping, and we were to make no noise. He staggered down the stairs in the late afternoon, lighting a cigarette with his Zippo, creases from the pillow on his face. Right away he left to drive to San Francisco, where he taught evening classes at what the Bay Area art community called the School, the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute. After his classes, sometimes he’d indulge in a critique session with some of his colleagues or students and then head back across the Bay to his job at General Cable.
When Deedie got off work she usually stopped by the home of some friends “for a bit of cheer.” She often stayed there for dinner and didn’t come home until after we went to bed. Nat and I fixed our suppers, simple meals like a hamburger patty and chard from our Victory Garden, and maybe a baked potato. Once a week, by phone, Deedie ordered groceries to be delivered. She managed our ration books well and we always had enough food, all precisely designated, with no leftovers and no snacks. If Deedie came home earlier than nine or ten she collapsed on the living room couch and spent the evening napping.
Every weekday morning, Deedie filled her old thermos with black coffee, took the bus downtown, and got off by the UC Press, where David would be parked on a side street waiting for her. She climbed into the car with him and they drank their coffee from the same tin cup and smoked the cigarettes they’d stood in line to buy. They had about fifteen minutes to talk and catch up before Deedie was due at her desk, and then David went to his studio for a couple of hours before needing to get some sleep. Both Deedie and David worked half time on Saturdays, normal hours in those years. For the duration of the war, those fifteen minutes with the thermos of coffee were the only times my parents saw each other during the week.
On Sundays they slept. We tiptoed around. Their door remained closed, and when they finally emerged from their room, Deedie took naps all afternoon, naked in the sun. David played the piano and went off to his studio. With so little use, the downstairs rooms remained tidy and always ready for company. Nat remembers Deedie playing records while cleaning house. There’s Deedie on a Saturday afternoon, idly shoving a dust mop over the floors, a glass of beer in one hand and Billie Holiday singing away on the record player. Company usually came for supper on Saturday or Sunday night and Deedie picked sprawling, informal bouquets of nasturtiums and geraniums and placed them on top of the piano, on the back of the toilet, on the coffee table.
We had frequent houseguests because the Bay Area was plagued with a severe housing shortage during the war. Some guests lived with us for months. And sometimes David’s two brothers, Dick and Ted, would be home on leave from the South Pacific. Dick was on Johnson Atoll battling deadly boredom during the construction of an airstrip, and Teddy was having the time of his life, along with a few bad moments, as a fighter pilot zooming all over the wild blue yonder. They were handsome men, fit and deeply tanned, with the same wide, infectious grin as David’s. As in the old Peterborough days, some comment would hit them as hilariously funny, or they’d get going on some Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics, sung hugely from imperfect memories.
During the war years, we saw a new look in David’s paintings. Materials were scarce and expensive, and he used both oil paint and encaustics, beeswax melted over a Bunsen burner and tinted with pigments. He applied the waxy mix with a palette knife or a brush with short, stiff bristles, for the material did not have the easy flow of oil paint. Instead of canvas, he often used Masonite board for his surface. Wartime shortage of materials seems to have dictated the size of his paintings, with twenty-five inches in height or width about maximum.
Fig. 20. Women with Salad Bowl. c. 1942–45 Encaustic on Masonite, 23½ × 21¼ in. (59.7 × 54.0 cm.) Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Bequest of Lydia Park Moore and Roy Moore
Colors were often, but not always, muted ochers and browns, with touches of reds and golds. He painted masks, profiles, a woman tossing salad in a bowl, another woman putting on an earring. The use of the palette knife and the way the encaustics handled led David to a thicker coverage of paint than before. In his work from the thirties, the weave of canvas is often visible beneath the paint. Not so in his encaustics. There’s a textural build-up, the beginning use of thick paint that later became a Park trademark. In terms of paint application, David’s work from the war years is a bridge between his early work and what was to come.
Fig. 21. Transparent Mask, c. 1942–45 Encaustic on Masonite, 15½ × 17½ in. (39.4 × 44.5 cm.) Collection of David Park Schutz
And in terms of style, Deedie’s comment about the way David spoke, that he was an original, that there was “a certain tang” to his words, comes to mind. From the early representational work, through his Picasso period and into his wartime encaustics, David’s images change radically but remain soundly his own. The natural authority first showing up in his childhood work as ripples on water or a skyline of New Hampshire woods had developed as the confident and unique head of the woman with earring, or the overlaid profiles in the painting Three Profiles, which was chosen by David’s close friend Mark Schorer as cover art for his book Pieces of Life, published by Farrar Straus in 1977, years after David’s death.
Fig. 22. Woman with Earring ca. 1942–45 Encaustic on Masonite, 16 × 16 in. (40.6 × 40.6 cm.) Private collection
Fig. 23. Book jacket, Pieces of Life by Mark Schorer Jacket design by Muriel Nasser for Pieces of Life by Mark Schorer. Jacket design ©1977 by Muriel Nasser David Park’s painting Three Profiles is reproduced on the jacket by permission of his widow, Mrs. Roy Moore. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Because he had so little time to paint, David’s output was small in those years, but he liked at least some of the work he managed to get done. In a letter to his father from November 1943, he wrote:
Dad, your comments about the fatigue that comes from being keyed up to your job make me squirm with jealousy. I know what you’re talking about but I don’t have the pleasure of that kind of fatigue much nowadays. . . . My two to three hour interval in the studio every morning is more often than not unproductive and merely a case of going through certain motions. I’ve accomplished blessed little but I will say that that little is not wholly bad. It would seem dismally depressing to me except that I can’t help but feel sure that as a kind of discipline this whole experience is valuable.
One evening when I was ten, David and I were standing on the driveway. In the dusk, the air was alive with the spicy scent of dark green redwood trees. It was garbage night, and David and I had just lugged the can down to the street. While huffing our way back up the steep driveway, David had been talking about basic human needs, things everyone had to have in order to survive. He said he thought there were four of these basic needs. We stopped walking and stood in the dim light, facing each other. He waited for me to figure out what the four were. I said, “Food, water, shelter, and—love?”
David shook his head thoughtfully. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think the fourth need is recognition.”
Museums all over the country have paintings of his now. A friend once came upon a painting by David in a museum in São Paulo. I’ve heard people say “A David Park,” meaning a painting. After David died, Deedie turned a corner in the American Embassy in London, and there was a painting that used to hang on the wall above her couch in Berkeley. She wrote that she was so thrilled she “got the jitters,” but couldn’t say much of anything because she was with the man she married after David died. She tried to mask her reaction, possibly more a comment on her internal conflict of loyalty than on her new husband’s imagined response.
She was to watch David’s work gain more and more recognition in the art world. He would be enormously moved by what has happened, and astounded by some of the prices his paintings have fetched. For all his adult life he struggled to pay each bill; when a hundred dollars came in as a gift from Grandpop or because a painting was sold, Deedie and David looked at each other in stunned relief.
On the driveway that night long ago, David and I stood facing each other in the darkening air. I’d never thought about recognition before. He was right, people needed it. I needed it. And love? I saw that love and recognition were wound up together or even, perhaps, recognition preceded love. At the time, it was a lot to think about. I nodded at my father. He must have been watching me process the thoughts and liked what he saw, for his face broke into his beaming grin. That’s probably why I remember the moment.
Deedie suffered from mysterious and lasting skin rashes and put herself on long diets that never helped. Intermittently attacked by migraine headaches, she lay still and silent in her darkened room, and we were not to disturb her.
Fig. 24. David with children, New Hampshire, c. 1938. The boy is the son of family friends; the girl is the author attempting to blow up a balloon.
She never scolded us or criticized us or told us what to do. She rarely knew where I was, and didn’t ask. We had no rules, except the unspoken one of being people our parents could respect. Decency, kindness, and a certain warm friendliness were expected of us, and beyond that Nat and I were left pretty much on our own.
It didn’t occur to me to say to myself or my friends that Deedie left us alone too much, that she slept on the couch whenever she was home, that if I needed something from her I had to ask her in the morning. If I asked in the afternoon or evening, she wouldn’t remember. It didn’t occur to me to wonder if David knew all this, or to put into words my awareness that Deedie couldn’t remember what I told her because she’d had too much to drink. All of it was just our normal life, and I had no perspective with which to view it differently.
Deedie often told us that we were “absolutely marvelous.” Over and over she said it, adding that we would grow up to have absolutely marvelous lives. Later it occurred to us that if she let herself think we really were absolutely marvelous people, then she didn’t have to do anything about faults, struggles, poor behavior. Her belief put her on a gentle path of parental abdication.
Nat was a bright, shy child who started school at four years old and then early in kindergarten was moved into second grade. This made her younger than her classmates by two years and caused unhappiness that lasted through sixth grade. Overwhelmed by the social gap, she used to sit at her desk doing all her work well and responsibly, with tears running down her cheeks.
Remembering that brings to mind something Edith Truesdell told me when she was in her nineties and I was in my fifties, two decades after David died.
“You kids weren’t raised,” Edith said. “You just grew.”
That provoked a lot of thought, especially because by then, Nat and I were longtime parents. We both marveled on the unusual, absent, even neglectful parenting that had come our way from Deedie and David. Edith, looking back at her long life as a painter, said something else that plays into the whole subject of Deedie and David as parents. Edith told me it had taken her many years to accept the fact that she was a creative person. To say so had seemed like self-flattery. Finally, though, she understood that not only was she creative, but in order to be so, she had to accept the fact that she must also be selfish. She didn’t elaborate.
As with David, painting was always Edith’s fierce, abiding engagement. She lived to be ninety-eight and painted until she was ninety-seven. She lived in one room in a full-care retirement home and painted with acrylics on top of her bed, where she placed her canvas on large sheets of cardboard, passionately scavenged and hoarded in her closet. When Edith was in her seventies and eighties, she put her cardboard and canvas on the floor and painted, standing, bending over. She was David’s mentor and ally all his life.
She was also a dominant influence in Nat’s life and mine—more dominant, in my view, than any of our grandparents. Many things she said have resonated with me for decades, such as her comment about creativity and being selfish.
I think David knew about selfishness. He may not have liked it, but I think he accepted it. Painting came first. The family and friends were loved, the jobs and responsibilities attended to, but painting was at the center of everything. Nat and I grew up knowing that David painting was the most important thing in our family. Not David, not painting, but David painting.
As the war years passed, I often heard myself exaggerating the truth or inventing stories I told as if they were real. A long story developed during junior high, toward the end of the war. I told my friends I had twin cousins back East, where we used to live. My cousins’ family raised golden retrievers, had an evil uncle, and one of the cousins was missing. He might be headed to California, escaping the uncle. My drama-lie went on for weeks, and my girlfriends got caught up in it. We pondered the moral dilemma: When he came, should I tell my parents? Or hide him somewhere and sneak him food?
Finally, one of my friends realized it was all a lie. I could feel it. I saw her whispering to other friends and I thought I would die. And this after I’d repeatedly promised myself that I was never going to lie again. When David got up that afternoon I asked him if I could talk to him. He came into my room. I was lying down, sick with misery. He sat on the edge of my bed, hair falling across his forehead, his blue eyes intense, and said, “What’s up?”
I told him that I’d lied for months and made up a whole other life, and I’d been found out. My best friend caught on, and I could never go to school again. Everyone would hate me.
“Well, that’s pretty serious.”
“But what should I do?”
For a long minute he smoked and exhaled and thought, then tipped ashes off into the cuff of his khaki pants. “Only thing that occurs to me,” he said in his slow, deep voice, “is to telephone your friend and tell her everything.”
“You mean, everything?”
“Yup.”
“But I can’t do that.”
David stood up. “Well,” he said, “it’s the only thing I can think of.” He sweetly added that I could bring the telephone, with its long cord, into my room to make the call.
Appalled, I watched him cross to the door. He turned, hesitated, and said, “And, kiddo, the next time you get the urge to tell a story, buy yourself a notebook.”
And then he was gone. I stared after him, his words exploding. Not the telephone call—I saw that he was right, that telling my friend was the only thing I could do. It terrified me, and I would do it immediately and get it over with. But what had blasted my mind was the idea of a notebook. It had never occurred to me. I could write a story.
Years later, I came across a quote of David’s in a 1959 article by art historian and writer Eleanor C. Munro that appeared in Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts. The quote reinforced my understanding of David’s central message to me that long-ago day. In the Horizon article he expressed his view of the influence psychoanalysis had on art. Psychoanalysis, he said, “has helped establish a feeling that your faults have color, have value; so instead of working for perfection, you can work toward being yourself.” He helped me be myself by telling me to go and buy a notebook.
“D-DAY,” said huge black headlines filling the whole top half of the morning paper, and David explained about the invasion and that he hoped it meant the beginning of the end of the war. Then things got much worse. Gloom and angst accumulated in all the grownups, and horrible pictures appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle: the Allies slogging across Europe and hollow faces in living skeletons and heaped bones and skulls. The images burned indelibly.
Still, part of my war experience was that the “War Effort” swelled the heart, and some of it was even fun—the buying of war savings stamps, the collecting of foil and tin, the fussing over ration coupons, our Victory Garden. Nat remembers that we were sometimes given notes from Deedie or David so that we could stand in line to buy cigarettes for them—the note gave us permission. With the name-brand cigarettes shipped off to the troops, new brands, such as Dominos, appeared in the stores.
On the day President Roosevelt died, I learned the news while standing on the bus as it was loading passengers at Berkeley’s main intersection, University and Shattuck avenues. As I looked idly out the bus window, I saw a wave of movement pass through the waiting crowd as, one by one, someone would bend toward the nearest person, say something, then the next person was told, and then the next. The wave of news flowed up onto our bus, and within moments we all knew the president was dead.
I searched the crowd for my sister, whom I often met at that intersection. I wanted her to be there, but she didn’t show up, and the bus started moving. All the way home I hung on to the strap, swaying in the crowded bus, sick and frightened that such an awful thing had happened. I was eleven, FDR was the sole president of my life, my parents and all their friends loved him, and I didn’t know what was going to happen to us now.
I’d just returned home and was sitting in the living room scared and miserable when Deedie came in the front door. Just as she entered the house, David came down the stairs. I could see by his face that he knew about FDR. Someone must have telephoned. Deedie and David made a sound when they saw each other, a sound like long-held breath being exhaled, and they fell into each other’s arms.
They were both in tears. “Oh, God,” David and Deedie both said. Oh, God.
Before they got home I’d been miserable, but the moment I saw them fold into each other and hug in grief over the president’s death, my mood changed. I was crying too, but I felt a great sense of rightness. They realized I was there, and a second later I was part of that long, tearful embrace.
On that August day of 1945 when the war was finally over, Nat and I were at summer camp by a river in the redwoods, the first and only time we ever went to camp. When news of Japan’s surrender exploded over the camp, we girls ran out on the highway and waved down cars, yelling, “The war is over! The war is over!”
When I think of the war years in our charming and slowly slipping house, one night always stands out. Dick and Teddy were home on leave, staying with us. Granny had come out on the train from Boston to see them. Many other friends were also there for dinner, and afterwards we all played a version of charades with costumes and props. We drew straws for teams of four and I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I was paired with David, Dick, and Teddy. In a burst of hilariously serious focus we all squeezed into a walk-in closet in the front hall hunting for costume ideas among the coats and jackets and umbrellas and boxes of stuff. For me, the teamwork, the silliness, and the energy of those three men created one of those radiant and perfect moments of childhood. I must have been glowing even in that dim closet because suddenly David was looking at me with a big, beautiful smile. I saw that he knew exactly how I felt. He nodded and said, “Yup,” and then we dove back into our frenzied search for costumes.
Soon after Dick and Teddy returned home from the war, I walked into our house one afternoon to find David in the living room, leaning against the piano, hunched over the telephone listening intently. Deedie stood nearby picking up what she could of the conversation. She signaled to me to stick around and I knew that something very bad had happened. David was talking to Dick’s wife, Iste, in New York State. Back then, long distance phone calls only occurred in emergencies and almost never lasted more than three minutes.
Still on the telephone, David said the word polio. Deedie’s and my glances shot to each other. Polio was the great horror of those years, especially during summertime. Polio was why you didn’t go swimming, feared summer parties, and avoided large gatherings. Polio crippled children for life, had crippled President Roosevelt, and now had struck Dick. Our tall, strong, athletic Dick. Deedie and David and Dick and Iste had dreamed that someday we would all live together; Dick and David would design houses and build them.
He had just been discharged and was staying with Iste and their three children, Tom and Nancy and Susan, at Iste’s parents’ home. Dick had come down with what at first seemed to be a severe case of the flu. But it wasn’t the flu, and now he was in the hospital in an iron lung. He was paralyzed, and he might not live.
I’d stood in a crowd of people once at the World’s Fair on Treasure Island, looking at a man in an iron lung. All I could see was a block of his face in a mirror over his head. He lived his life by eye contact only, through the small mirror. This image flooded my mind. Was this, now, to be Dick’s life?
David got off the phone and gravely repeated everything Iste had said. That afternoon, the intensity in David as he listened to Iste on the phone and then told it all to us gave me more of my father than I could have verbalized. In the lines on his face and the depth of feeling always evident in his eyes, I saw his love of Dick, his absorption of fact and fate, his grief and fear, the kick in the gut one feels at such a moment. David and Deedie did not go East to see Dick. The two couples were extremely close, but things were different in those years. Travel was prohibitively expensive, and those were the decades before credit cards.
Dick did not have to spend the rest of his days looking at life from a mirror on an iron lung. He spent a lot of time at the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation in Warm Springs, Georgia, learning to use what muscles were left. He had the use of strong leg muscles and strong hands, but couldn’t lift his arms. He turned his head with a move of his shoulders. His torso lacked musculature and became noticeably thin.
Dick loved working with wood, and so, over time, he learned how to compensate for his disability and safely use the necessary tools. Gradually he set himself up with a woodworking shop and even a lathe. For the rest of his life he made tables, lamps, and bowls. He made an elegant, simple, walnut frame for a painting of David’s. Knowing the extent of his paralysis, it seems impossible that he could do such beautiful work, but I think his mix of determination and basic eagerness for life made him succeed.
He also maintained a full career as, he said wryly, “a bureaucrat,” working in Civil Defense and for the National Academy of Sciences, and he fathered two more children, Kathy and Mary. A most reliable and humorous source of guidance, he was extremely important in Nat’s and my lives. Sadly, the early dream of all of us living together did not come to be.
Even with the war over and David no longer working the graveyard shift, in a 1947 letter to Dick and Iste, Deedie describes herself and David as exhausted: “David is fine and rather cute looking, but a hard-working fool. Looks young and attractive when not too tired and looks like hell when exhausted as who doesn’t. I am morbid looking in the face and graying hair, but a passable figer (sic) tipping the scales at 130, not too bad considering my unusual height. Have no new 47 clothes and no prospects of having any tho who cares.”
But our lives did change with the end of the war. David was no longer upstairs sleeping in the daytime. When we could get gasoline we drove down to Big Sur to visit Deedie’s brother, Gordon, in his handmade cabin high on a hill overlooking the Pacific. Sometimes on Sundays, we packed a lunch and went to the beach. Deedie would lie in the sun while David propped himself against a sand dune and sketched as the uneven cadence of the breaking and receding surf made its reassuring backdrop of sound. Often there were gatherings of friends at the beach, with everyone bringing food and drink.
Fig. 25. David sketching at a California beach, c. 1946
In those first postwar years, David’s paintings burst into the freedom of abstraction, the dominant focus of students and teachers at the California School of Fine Arts. Veterans on the GI Bill, fairly brimming with pent-up energy for art, flooded the School. David made fast friends with another teacher at the School, Elmer Bischoff. And a tall, lanky student named Richard Diebenkorn caught his attention.
Later Dick Diebenkorn said that when he and David first met, he knew right away that David was extraordinary. He dropped a sculpture class to take painting from David. Soon Dick joined the faculty, and weekly critique sessions started, attended by David, Dick, Elmer, and Hassel Smith, who was also teaching at the School. Friendship between Dick, Elmer, and David began in those postwar years and lasted until David died. To this day the three painters are thought of together in the world of art history.
David’s wartime fatigue eased away. He laughed more, talked more, hung around our house more, and loved going over to the School to work. A Dixieland jazz band formed at the School, with David on piano, Elmer Bischoff on cornet, and the rest of the band made up of other teachers, students, and the School’s director, Douglas MacAgy, who played the drums. Studio 13 Jazz Band, as it was known, became a big part of our lives, with lots of rehearsals and parties and dancing, and candles stuck in empty wine jugs with wax dripping down the sides.
David taught a full load of day and evening classes and drew and painted between classes in a small studio upstairs at the School. He kept his big Berkeley studio, where he did most of his work. Unfinished paintings stood on the floor, leaning against the walls. Canvases were large, with lush, strong colors.
The famous Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still was teaching at the School, and had a profound effect on faculty and students alike. Although initially David liked Still’s work, he grew uneasy with a sense of cultism that surrounded the man. David’s great friend Elmer Bischoff later said that when Still’s work became more and more “cosmological” and people imbued it with religious meaning, David became less sympathetic. True to form, David was following his own way rather than someone else’s. It was as if Still’s popularity gave David an opportunity to rely on his own strength.
David’s nonobjective paintings showed a thick build-up of paint, as did the work of many students and colleagues. Brushstrokes became almost sculptural. You could stand close to the painting and discover the order in which strokes had been applied. Mounded globs of paint peaked, like whipped cream, and where the peak folded down on itself a secret color, previously hidden inside, was often revealed.
Paint dribbled and ran down the canvas. Or it slumped like clay soil on a hill. Leftover colors at the edges of a canvas hinted at earlier images now painted over and gone. I would never know what the earlier paintings were, but they created a kind of framework that ended up having everything to do with the rest of the current painting.
I couldn’t explain anything about the abstract paintings to my friends, who used to ask what this or that painting was supposed to be about. “Why does he let the paint run?” they would ask, pointing at a dribble. Nat remembers standing with David in the door of the dining room, looking into the living room at the paintings on the walls. She was aware of David’s effort as he answered a question she’d just asked about Abstract Expressionism. He said to look for where the color took the eye, how colors echoed here and there on the canvas, how “stuff” or lines that were happening formed shapes.
But unless asked directly, David never talked about composition or the action on a canvas, or about representation, or about what color did. I don’t think he ever referred to himself as an artist, but always, instead, a painter. As with Edith and her reticence to call herself creative, the word artist was complimentary, not the sort of thing you’d say about yourself. Nat and I both had the experience of telling friends that our father was a painter, then realizing they thought we meant that he painted houses.
After the war, Nat and I spent part of our summers with Edith Truesdell at her ranch in the Rockies. Edith had a way with questions. One day while we were prowling around in the forest gathering wood for the cook stove, she asked me how I thought my mother was. I told Edith that Deedie had migraines and Edith asked what I thought caused them. Caused them?
“What do you think about all those cocktails?” Edith asked.
“Oh, they’re fine,” I replied quickly, not going near the truth, which was that Deedie, a valued employee at the University of California library, wore herself out there and wandered through the evening in a gently inebriated fog or was sound asleep on the couch.
As Nat and I entered our teens, Deedie and David’s parenting did not change. They didn’t bawl us out, didn’t ground us, didn’t tell us how to dress, how to behave. They never once gave us a lecture. They didn’t ever say Do this, Do that; they didn’t ever say Don’t.
Throughout high school I cut classes all the time. David, also a misfit at school, had been allowed to drop out and go west with Edith, yet his natural confidence and his artistic gift sailed him into his life. By the time he was twenty-two, when he would have graduated from college, he had a wife and two children, was part of the art community, had his work accepted in juried shows, and taught painting and drawing.
I had my first job at fourteen, working after school at a drugstore soda fountain. I made sundaes, cones, sodas, milkshakes, and sandwiches until the drugstore closed at six. Streetcars deposited junior high and high school students right across the street from the drugstore. Many stopped in at the soda fountain. They ordered double-decker ice cream cones for ten cents or a milkshake for a quarter. I made the thickest shakes and fattest cones those kids had ever seen.
I loved my job. I’d never felt so popular. My right arm ached, my muscles bulged, I scooped and scooped. More and more kids came, glad to see me, calling out my name. My boss, Mr. Stein, watched this scene every afternoon from an upstairs office window that looked down over the store. Business had never been so good in terms of customer count, but under my domain the profit margin at the soda fountain must have evaporated.
One day Mr. Stein met me at the door and said, “Here’s what I owe you. Don’t come back. You’re fired.”
With my heart thudding, I walked the long, uphill blocks home. I’d been robbing Mr. Stein by giving away his ice cream just so the kids would like me, and now I had to go home and was going to have to tell my family. Worse, my sister had worked successfully at the same drugstore for over two years.
At the dinner table I stared down at my plate and said, “Today I got fired.”
I looked at David. His eyebrows went up. Slowly, he said, “Well.”
Across from me my sister froze, as silence hung over the table. David held my gaze for a long, thoughtful pause. His face and his eyes and the way he leaned toward me, thinking, and the very air around him brought all my actions at the drugstore into the moment.
He said, “Do you know why you were fired?”
I nodded. There was no doubt in my mind.
“Good,” said David, the importance of the message reverberating in the room. He didn’t ask any more questions. Nat and Deedie remained silent. No conversational buzz softened the moment, and I was left to think.
As I grew up and occasionally told the story of getting fired and what David said, people have asked what the experience gave me, looking back at it. I think it gave me self-respect, and certainly morality. But that sparse moment was complex, and I keep noticing new layers. That is how I have often felt when looking at David’s paintings—their largeness, their sparsity, the way they show me more. He gave each painting what he gave me that day: the whole David, fully absorbed, doing the best he could, giving everything he had, including his trust. His paintings allow viewers their own experience, their own full imaginative process.
This resonates with the example of his own father, a highly educated Bostonian, a Unitarian minister, an honorable man whose life work was to profoundly consider God and religions and teachings. His children attended church on Sunday mornings and sat in a front pew with Granny, behaving themselves while their father spoke from the pulpit. Other than that, their religion or spiritual paths were left for each child to find. Grandpop respected their right to choose, and he respected their choices. His daughter Marion attended the Unitarian Church for the rest of her life, and I think it is safe to say that Ted, David, and Dick grew up and never went to church again.
Grandpop’s respect for his children, and his trust in them, flowed right into David as painter and father. He didn’t lecture. His ego didn’t slant the work or the message. What he gave was his own deep self, not a role—not fatherhood, not artisthood, just David.
For Christmas when I was fifteen David handed similar packages to Nat and me, and I knew right away that they were paintings. I’d never been given a painting before, a painting just for me. Tearing off the tissue paper was scary. What if the painting was—well, you can’t exactly say “wrong,” not when your father painted it, but what if you didn’t love it? What do you do then?
The paintings were small and the same size, seven and a half by four and a half inches. They were gorgeous, humorous birds, and I loved them both immediately. Nat’s was yellow and mine was blue. David never painted animals as the sole subject. Nothing like this had ever happened. Just a bird on a canvas, standing there being funny and bright with wings and tail feathers spread open in a manner that reminded me of the way he often painted fingers and hands. Nat’s bird was bending down as if to find a seed or bug, and mine was stretching up as if to fly. Later, those two bird paintings and another from the same period, Girl with Bird, symbolized, for me, the lifting of everyone’s spirits after the long, hard years of war.
Fig. 26. Nat’s Bird, 1947 Oil on canvas, 7½ × 4½ in. (19.1 × 11.4 cm.) Collection of Natalie Park Schutz
Fig. 27. Girl with Bird, c. 1946 Oil on canvas, 15½ × 12 in. (39.4 × 30.5 cm.) Private collection
On most years at Christmas there was a shiny red and silver box that David brought home from a shopping trip to Ransohoff’s, an elegant women’s dress shop on Maiden Lane in San Francisco. To Nat’s everlasting pleasure, during her teenage years David took her on the shopping trips to be his model as he selected Deedie’s present. In the dressing room Nat slipped on David’s choices from among the pieces a saleslady had shown him. Then Nat came out and modeled the expensive silky cocktail dresses, usually black, although she remembers one that was a rich, deep bougainvillea red. David made her turn this way and that, and his eyes squinted as if at a canvas.
Then on Christmas morning when David handed Deedie her gift, Deedie always said, “Oh, darling, you shouldn’t have” in such a way that made David and Nat glow with pride.
One Christmas in the late 1940s, Deedie and David and the three or four other couples who were all best friends drew names from a pot for a gift-giving dinner party. Deedie drew Mark Schorer, bought him a nice ice bucket, and was well pleased with her choice. David drew the name of a friend he was devoted to but who happened to have been driving him absolutely crazy. She could get a little gushy and effusive and always adored everything, and her voice had an unfortunate high whine.
After David drew the woman’s name he hunted around the house and found some scraps of gray wool material, got out Deedie’s needles and threads, and set to work at the dining room table making an extremely odd object. It was like a giant banana that rose into the air from a base of two gray wool balls. When Deedie asked what in the world he was doing, he held his creation up, turned it and scrutinized it, and announced that he was making his present for the party. When finished, he wrapped the thing with Christmas paper and a red bow.
The night of the party four or five people gave each other identical round silver ice buckets with black plastic penguins embedded around their domes. As ice bucket after ice bucket was unwrapped, the evening became hilarious. Then David handed his gift over to its recipient. She opened it and held it up, looked baffled for a minute, and then said, “Oh, David, darrrling, you’ve made me a peeenis,” whereupon shouts of laughter erupted from everyone around the table.
Fig. 28. Untitled, 1947 Pencil on paper, size unknown From left to right, Lydia (Deedie) Park, David Park, Mark Schorer, Mildred Bronson, Bertrand Harris (Bud) Bronson, Howard Baker, Ruth Schorer, Dorothy Baker
On those evenings with his friends, David drank martinis or bourbon on the rocks, and the alcohol seemed to rinse away the gray fatigue covering him at the end of a day’s work. He never drank Old Fashioneds or Whiskey Sours, which were sweet and somehow déclassé, but he kept the mixings on hand for friends. Cocktail hour jollied him up, but I never saw him drunk. Generally, except when he was paying bills, David was a man of good temper. When he had the large flat checkbook out and papers all over the table, the whole room filled with his anguish about how the hell he was going to find the money. I stayed completely out of his way.
David told Natalie and me that when the time came that drinking would be part of our social lives, we should learn to drink at home first. Drink at home and find out about the stuff and what it does to you. Throw up in your own bathroom, and hopefully when you go out into the world you won’t make an ass out of yourself. That was David’s parental advice.
At cocktail hour and through dinner the talk ranged over the war, its aftermath, politics, books, music, art, and gossip about how in the world certain people got to be the way they were and what they’d gone and done now. Sometimes the conversations turned silly. From somewhere, David had heard the old adage that the human face can be categorized as resembling a horse, a bird, or a peach. If you tried to understand concepts in these categories, the whole thing became impossible. But with a table of people labeling one another, there was surprising unison: David, a horse. Deedie, a horse. Edith Truesdell, a bird. Nat, a bird. Me, a horse. Elmer Bischoff, decidedly a peach. Or someone would say, “Ann Wykoff.” “A horse,” from one end of the table. “A bird,” from the other. “You’re crazy.” “You’re nuts.” And I would sit there in that particular giddiness that comes to a kid when parents are being completely goofy.
Theater, music, books, art—those were the cultural enrichments common in my parents’ lives. Often the four of us went together to concerts, plays, and musicals. We drove over to San Francisco in our old convertible, we girls in the rumble seat. Along with throngs of theatergoers, we parked at the Union Square Garage. In those days you left your car to be driven away and parked. After the performance, sidewalks were thick with people flooding back to Union Square to collect their cars and drive home.
One night we saw Oklahoma! We all loved it, the songs still alive for us as we hurried back to get our car. As always, the crowd of people waiting for their cars stood and watched every person climb into every vehicle. Up chugged our old Gray Goose, and believe me, there is no way to climb into a rumble seat with dignity. Those were the moments when I longed to belong to a family that was just like everyone else’s. Driving home across the bridge, from the front seat David sang lustily, “And the corn is as high as an elephant’s thigh . . .”
“Eye, darling, eye,” cried Deedie, and they both burst into a fit of the giggles. In the rumble seat, Nat and I rolled our eyes and hunched down out of the wind.
Sometimes I stopped by David’s studio in the afternoon on my way home from Berkeley High. The entrance to the studio was up some dark stairs on a side street near Shattuck Avenue. David never locked his door, and I would step into the studio quietly, at once enveloped by the clean, astringent scents of oil paint and turpentine.
He would turn and see me and grin, and I knew he was glad I’d come. This was David’s constant gift. When any of us returned to the house at the end of a day, there was David’s face lighting up in a wide, welcoming smile. Wherever he directed that smile—at me, Nat, Deedie, or any of their friends—it made me feel that everything was good; it warmed the entire room.
Fig. 29. Untitled abstract, c. 1946–49 Oil on canvas, size unknown. Possibly destroyed
Fig. 30. Untitled abstract, c. 1946–49 Oil on canvas, size unknown. Possibly destroyed
Those days at the studio he went right back to work, and I flopped down on an old brown couch. The couch faced the easel, which held the current painting. This was the late 1940s, and David’s work was all abstract oils on large canvases, bright with color and life, as if set free from the wartime gloom. Along with his colleagues, David had started the financially liberating use of house paint in addition to the costly little tubes of oils. So what I saw everywhere was thick paint, rich paint, liberally applied. In his book The New Figurative Art of David Park (Capra Press, 1988), Paul Mills, author, friend, and authority on California painting, said David’s work of the postwar years was “notable for its exuberant spontaneity and its extreme use of paint.”
David’s paint was so thick that his brushstrokes lay indented in splotches, globs, and swirls and ran down the canvas. There was no hint of landscape or figures or still life. No ideas spoke out to me from the canvas, just paint and form and color. I didn’t like to talk about the abstracts because I didn’t know what to say, but I liked looking at them. It was as if the colors took my gaze for a ride, made it travel all over the terrain with no guidance from me.
A stool stood in front of the easel, and David would sit there and hold his hand out at eye level, blocking off some of the painting from his vision. With a cigarette hanging from his lips and smoke drifting up across his face, he’d sit, gaze, stand up, scowl, pace backwards, frown, take a drag, walk forward and work an area, walk backwards squinting at it, hold up his thumb or the paintbrush to block something out, walk to another part of the room, walk backwards to yet another.
At a glass tabletop beside his stool he’d squeeze out some luscious gleaming colors from little tubes of paint, and he’d work his brush back and forth on the glass, mixing up exactly what he wanted. At last he’d turn back to the canvas and paint, in long strokes or short, in a build-up of color or a taking-off.
Fig. 31. Untitled abstract, c. 1947 Oil on canvas, 43 × 35 in. (109.2 × 88.9 cm.)
On the narrow ledge of the easel, where the painting stood, a thick, gloppy spill of paint had accumulated over the years. To me, it was beautiful beyond words, a richly built-up, gleaming, sculptural fall of color. When David died, Deedie gave his easel to an earnest young painter, and I miss it to this day.
On those afternoon studio visits, an hour or two would pass in silence, except for David’s footsteps or the whirl of the wheel of his Zippo lighter. I’d read a book or watch him work. He had a radio but never turned it on, claiming to be too single-minded to be able to handle the distraction.
Occasionally he asked me what I thought of a painting. Instantly uncomfortable, I couldn’t pin my response on subject matter, so I would stare at the painting, and then I’d realize something simple, such as the way my eye moved between a certain color in one part of the painting and its echo in another brushstroke somewhere else and that I liked the pull between the colors, but I never knew how to say it.
Sometimes I spent the whole afternoon there in the studio. Then we’d wash the brushes, first swishing them in a can of turpentine and then working them back and forth against a bar of Ivory soap, pressing hard and getting the soap deep into the roots of the brush. It was a triumph to get the brushes soft and clean and the hairs free of any stickiness. We put them business-end-up in another coffee can, cleaned our hands, and went outside into the rest of the world.
Fig. 32. David Park, c. 1950. Photograph by Harry Redl
After school on a winter afternoon in Berkeley, I was packed into the aisle of the No. 67 Spruce Street bus with some of my high school girlfriends when I spotted David on the sidewalk at University and Shattuck. In the winter dusk I watched him move with the crowd toward the door of the bus. I was fascinated, standing in the aisle hanging on to an overhead strap and watching my father when he didn’t know I was there. He had his paint clothes on—the gray sweatshirt and khaki pants. I kept him in view as he entered and dropped his token in the hopper. He looked exhausted and suddenly older as he moved down the crowded aisle. I smelled the cigarettes, the oil paint and the turpentine, and I waited. Then he saw me, and all the fatigue in his face washed away in his grin. He had paint on his sweatshirt, paint on his pants. I introduced him to my girlfriends. Even as they shook hands and said, “How do you do,” I saw their eyes widen. In his paint-soiled sweatshirt and rumpled pants, he didn’t look a bit like their fathers or anyone else’s they had ever seen. Although it’s hard to believe now, in those postwar years Berkeley was an extremely conservative town. My friends barely knew what a painter was and had never seen one before.
We all stood together swaying on the straps as the bus pulled away from the curb and started its lumbering journey up into the hills. I felt awkward, unable to giggle and gossip with my girlfriends in the usual manner, unable to talk to David with them hearing. Something about my father’s face made me realize he always looked tired. He was thirty-seven, and that day, that moment in the bus, I understood him differently. I saw the connection between his fatigue and the way he poured his whole life and soul onto a canvas every minute he could.
At the time of our encounter on the bus, David did not talk about feelings of displeasure in his own work or the lonesome anguish that disappointment in his paintings surely produced. He never spoke of discouragement. But some of those feelings must have been there, must even have seethed and fermented, for the day came, toward the end of the 1940s, when he encountered a truth that changed the rest of his life, that created a waypoint as meaningful as the moment back in 1930 when he met my mother.
This is how I imagine the scene on that day in 1949 when he went to work in an ordinary way. Unaware of impending change, David stood in his studio looking around and caught something in his work he didn’t like. It stopped him cold. He pulled a cigarette from a nearby pack of Camels, looking around the large, square room where dozens of paintings stood on the floor, stacked against the wall. He reached into his pocket for his Zippo lighter, thumbed the top open, spun the flint wheel, and inhaled. Paintings that stood face to the wall, he turned and scrutinized. He looked deeply, painfully absorbed. These were all strong, energetic, dramatic abstracts, thick with paint and color.
In 1953, David wrote of these paintings, and this moment:
I was concerned with big abstract ideals like vitality, energy, profundity, warmth. They became my gods. They still are. I disciplined myself rigidly to work in ways I hoped might symbolize those ideals. I still hold those ideals today, but I realize that those paintings practically never, even vaguely, approximated any achievement of my aims. Quite the opposite: what the paintings told me was that I was a hard-working guy who was trying to be important.
Fig. 33. Still Life—Non-Objective, 1949 Oil on canvas, 34 × 25 in. (86.4 × 63.5 cm.) Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of the Women’s Board A62.35.2
Even in the paintings he liked the most, the ones that “worked,” he saw self-consciousness. Once seen, once recognized, David wanted the paintings gone, out of his sight. He wanted no possible temptation to work on them again.
It must have been a weekend day, because Deedie helped him. Perhaps she happened to drop by the studio or perhaps he drove home and got her. I imagine them parking the car as close to the studio as possible, near where the Berkeley Repertory Theatre now stands. They climbed up the steep, unlit staircase and let themselves in. Arms outstretched and grasping the sides of large, bulky paintings, craning to see around the edges, they shuffled gingerly back down the dark steps to the sidewalk, where they angled the canvases into the rumble seat. Back they went for another load. Precariously down the steep steps again, and up and down until the car could not hold another piece. Wet paintings, dry paintings, large and small, they stacked, stuffed, and tied them onto the car.
They drove to Berkeley’s city dump at the edge of the Bay, a few acres of mounded, muddy garbage, ancient rusty bedsprings, and heaps of garden waste with tractors working it over, a straight shot across the water from the Golden Gate Bridge. Parking their little gray car, they got out in the wind and the stench and untied their load. With dozens of gray and white seagulls wheeling and screeching overhead, David hauled out a painting and sailed it into the wind. What a complex moment, but what freedom. They both went to work, tossing out another, and another, until all the paintings lay before them in a crazy scatter, some paint-side-up, some with stretcher bars snapped by the fall, some with corners embedded in rotting orange peels and soggy, crumpled newspapers.
They turned, got in their car, and drove away. The hard-working guy who was trying to be important went back to an empty studio, with no abstractions left. Meaningful to me is the fact that this whole event, this purging at the city dump, perhaps the best-known story that exists about David, went by in our family with no mention, no fanfare, no dinner table discussion. It became simply something Nat and I knew, but without any descriptions of the day, the sun or fog, the light or drizzle, the feelings of the two people who were there. I didn’t even know that Deedie went with David until she mentioned it in an interview years after he died. I assume that “trying to be important” was so galling to unpretentious David that to announce the day’s event would have felt as if he were continuing along that line. Perhaps telling the story would have interfered with the action’s cleansing effect. He was left with a bare studio, blank canvases, and the huge question of what he was going to do now.
What he did was to return to the figure as subject matter. He understood exactly what he was doing—understood his rejection of his own Abstract Expressionist work, understood his return to the figure. A few years later, in a conversation with Paul Mills, David said, “Art ought to be a troublesome thing, and one of my reasons for painting representationally is that this makes for much more troublesome pictures.”
Music had always been one of David’s great loves, and in the early years he had drawn and painted musical instruments and musicians. As a child he wondered if he would grow up to be a pianist, but in the end painting won out. In 1959, for an exhibition catalogue, he wrote:
I like to play Bach, Mozart (short piano pieces), and am quite willing to say that I render these superbly as long as no one is around to listen. And I play jazz with absolutely no competence and considerable energy with a group of amateurs who—fortunately for the “band”—play quite well. I’ve grown to prefer it to playing serious music—it’s a better antidote to the solitary life of painting. It has helped me in painting to be extravagant with paint.
How fitting it is, then, that the first painting we have after his trip to the Berkeley city dump, the first work in which he put people and objects back onto the canvas, is the image of his band of Dixieland musicians. He called the painting Rehearsal. We see Douglas MacAgy on drums, possibly Conrad Janis on trombone, the backs of Elmer Bischoff on cornet and Charlie Clarke on clarinet, probably Jon Schueler on bass, and the edge of David’s head at the piano.
Most about the image was new, not the least the unusual spatial dominance of the lower left front of the canvas. The entire scene is full of suggestive detail: the curve of the bass drum, the right hand of the man with the horn, the backs of chairs, the floorboards, the unseen lid of the piano, the piano strings, the wrinkles on a sleeve. If I had said to David that I liked the lift of the bass player’s hand away from his fret board, and that the light between his fingers made me almost hear the thick, low thrum of a plucked string, and if I had asked David if he’d thought of those elements while painting, I think he would have said no. He was just trying to paint a good painting of the band.
Fig. 34. Rehearsal, 1949–50 Oil on canvas, 46 × 35¾ in. (116.8 × 90.8 cm.) Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of the Anonymous Donor Program of the American Federation of Arts A62.34
The term “Figurative Painting” hadn’t been coined, and nobody knew what to call the new work. In David’s studio, more canvases emerged with objects and figures. All his contemporaries and friends were still fully engaged with Abstract Expressionism.
The other painters couldn’t imagine what was happening to David. They knew him as somewhat irreverent, scoffing at convention, being very much his own person, but with those new paintings some of his colleagues wondered if he’d simply chickened out. It’s hard now to realize how starkly his new paintings stood apart from the accepted look of those postwar years. However, in 1997 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hung a show called Making Art Histories: On the Trail of David Park. The exhibit displayed abstract work by many of David’s peers in the late 1940s and 1950s, large, active works full of vitality. In the middle of one wall was a Park painting of bathers at a beach. Among those wild, bold abstracts, David’s painting looked lost, out of place, even forlorn.
Fig. 35. Installation view from the exhibition Making Art Histories: On the Trail of David Park, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1997–98 From left to right, paintings by Kenzo Okada, 1956; James Kelly, 1956; Sonia Gechtoff, 1958; Arthur Okamura, 1959; David Park, 1954; Karl Benjamin, 1959; Bruce Conner, 1959; Hassel Smith, 1960. Image © Ben Blackwell
Fig. 36. Bathers, 1954 Oil on canvas, 42 × 54¼ in. (106.7 × 137.8 cm.) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gift of the Women’s Board, 60.7412
Out of place or not, I think David’s early figurative work achieved at least some of what he intended. He says as much about another painting, Sunbather (following page), in a piece he wrote for the catalogue of an exhibition at the University of Illinois in 1952, where the painting was shown:
If I am painting a sunbather on a beach I want it to be warm and open and simple and solid and light-hearted, and yet heavy with relaxation, and it should also have the freshness of clean air. I believe I was thinking about these and many such things when I painted that picture.
Seeing David’s early figurative work amidst his friends’ and contemporaries’ paintings pointed up his bravery and how alone he had been. But for David, who had recently thrown off the weight of trying too hard with his nonobjective work, his process of painting Sunbather must indeed have given him the freshness of clean air. I think he must have loved placing the shoes on the sand right there. I think he must have heard the gentle breaking of the surf across the wide, sun-drenched beach.
Fig. 37. Sunbather, 1950–53 Oil on canvas, 36¼ × 46¼ in. (92.1 × 117.5 cm.) In the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.. Gift of Lydia Park Moore, wife of the artist 1971.4.5
This new territory David had entered was uncharted; there was no language for it. No other painters were exploring it. Rehearsal was shown in March of 1950 at a San Francisco Art Association members’ show and was not commented upon.
The following March, at a juried show, David exhibited Kids on Bikes. A prizewinner, the painting was reproduced in the catalogue and in the local papers. It appeared in a national magazine, Art Digest, but without comment. Perhaps the critics didn’t know what to say. In these three early figurative works, Rehearsal, Sunbather, and Kids on Bikes, David used the strong, dominant figure or object at a front corner of the painting, a handling of space that became part of the Park look.
Fig. 38. Kids on Bikes, 1950–51 Oil on canvas, 48 × 42 in. (121.9 × 106.7 cm.) Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis, Minnesota
In Kids on Bikes, an abstraction of trees creates an inner frame at the right side of the painting, a treatment he also used in later works. The white fence on the right establishes depth of field. I think he liked the way the white fence drew his gaze into the picture, for another one appears in a later painting.
In the early 1950s, following Douglas MacAgy’s departure from the School, David put in a few months as acting director, until a replacement took over. Enrollment decreased as the GI Bill ran out, and a new and more conservative direction at the School resulted in Diebenkorn’s voluntary departure and the dismissal of more progressive painters, such as David’s friend Hassel Smith.
In this difficult period, David also reached the decision to resign from the faculty; it was an act of protest over school politics regarding treatment of the faculty as a whole. Elmer Bischoff resigned at the same time for the same reasons. For days David struggled over his letter of resignation, crossing out, scribbling in margins, seeking our editorial comment as he read it out loud at the dinner table. Alone in his new artistic direction, even unsupported by his fellow painter friends—who didn’t understand what he was up to—missing the life at the School and searching around for full- or part-time work, David was decidedly on his own.
Fig. 39. David Park on a bicycle, Boston, ca. 1920
I was eighteen in the summer of 1951 when I packed a couple of cardboard boxes of treasures I wanted to keep from my life as Helen Park and married my high school boyfriend, Bob Green. In those boxes were a stack of composition notebooks in which, thanks to David’s advice, I’d written a novel about a missing twin and raising golden retrievers. Into the boxes went my Christmas-present bird painting from David, dried corsages from high school dances, yearbooks, and snapshots.
Bob was a junior at Cornell University, majoring in hotel administration. Off we went to Ithaca, New York, to start our lives together. Deedie and David and Nat and I began writing each other frequently. The letters from home were mostly handwritten, although sometimes Deedie would type. David, too, occasionally attacked the typewriter. “This damned thing insists on typing abuot instead of abuot.”
Meanwhile in Berkeley, in the first weeks of 1952, it rained steadily, around the clock, every day for more than three weeks. Letters were full of comment: “You wouldn’t believe it. Nobody talks about anything else. We’re all going to float out to sea.”
One day in Ithaca, my telephone rang and it was David. He said, “Hi, kiddo,” his voice heavy and urgent.
“What’s wrong?” I asked immediately.
Just after midnight the night before, David said, he and Deedie had been yanked awake by a horrible noise below. They rushed past Nat’s room, where she was sleeping, and raced downstairs. Shattered all over the floor lay the huge window overlooking the bay. Bricks from the chimney had tumbled into the fireplace. “The whole house was breaking up,” David said.
I said, “Was there an earthquake?”
“No, just rain.”
“My God, what did you do?”
“We stood around looking and then went back to bed.”
“You what?”
When Nat woke up early the next morning, Deedie called sleepily, “Be careful.” Downstairs, Nat discovered great shards of glass where the big bay window had been. Our crooked house with its unstable soil had been relentlessly settling and slipping. Now weeks of rain had so saturated the soil that its gradual slump increased, and at some moment in the night pressures snapped the glass from the window frame and the bricks out onto the floor. If the giant boulder hadn’t been there, the house would have crashed down the hill.
Just after dawn Deedie and David put out a call to their friends, and many showed up to help. Right then, while he was talking to me on the phone, people were moving our belongings out of the house. We’d been there ten years, and they had one day to move. Everybody was stuffing boxes into cars, tying furniture on roofs, backing cars around the narrow, rutted, muddy driveway. Even the piano went to a friend’s house. First thing in the morning Deedie had hurried off and rented a second-floor apartment near the campus, on Piedmont Avenue. It only had one bedroom but it was available that day, and David would give up his studio so that they could afford the new apartment. There was good light in the dining room where he could paint.
Breathless with all the news, I wrote down the address. He would drop me a line when they had their new telephone number. He had to rush, he had to say good-bye, he only had a minute but he wanted me to know.
We hung up. I stood in the tiny kitchen of my little rented apartment in Ithaca, looking around. A few dishes in the sink, red plaid curtains on the windows. I’d made the curtains, as Deedie had made ours in the big, beautiful Berkeley house. Suddenly the place I loved and still thought of as home had ceased to exist.
In the following days, the breaking house was taken down by a salvage company. The lovely broad redwood panels were carted away. Someone stacked a pile of curved roof tiles in our old Victory Garden. I saw them there years later.
In one day, Deedie, David, Nat, and their friends moved everything out of the house. In the process, Deedie threw away my boxes. I didn’t know this until a year later when I asked where they were. Deedie looked puzzled and couldn’t remember and then said, “Oh, God, I threw them out.”
Deedie would not have thrown my boxes away if she had realized David’s bird painting was there. But it, too, was at the Berkeley city dump.
In 1954, two years after the house was gone, David painted a large canvas of one man and two women seated at a dining room table. A bowl of fruit sits at the center of the table. There is no mistaking the table and chairs; they are ours, from that Berkeley house—the chairs with the woven rawhide seats.
The figures at the table are placed in the chairs where David and Nat and Deedie always sat. So much a painter’s daughter am I that it feels presumptuous to take David’s subject matter personally. It took many years of seeing that painting, called Table with Fruit, before it occurred to me that in the painting my place at the table is vacant, as it would have been in those six months between my wedding and the night the house broke up. Possibly David’s experience of seeing the table differently after I’d married and moved away came into play later, as he was finding his image for the painting. I like to think so. The last I heard, the painting is with a collector in the Midwest. I have a photograph of it, a gift from that decade on Santa Barbara Road.
Fig. 40. Table with Fruit (Bowl of Fruit), 1951–52 Oil on canvas, 46 × 35¾ in. (116.8 × 90.8 cm.) Private collection
Fig. 41. Louise, 1959 Oil on canvas, 48 × 56 in. (121.9 × 142.2 cm.) Private collection