PART THREE

THE FIFTIES

Fig. 42. Women with Towels (Bathers) 1958 Oil on canvas, 50¼ × 66 in. (127.6 × 167.6 cm.) Private collection

NOBODY WHO KNEW HIM would ever have expected David to end up decorating liquor store windows. But he did, in 1952, after he resigned from the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts. He earned what he could from different part-time jobs, including designing wallpaper. Although most of the work was drudgery, one small job let his sense of humor take over: making a poster for a burlesque theater on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. Eventually he went back to his wartime factory job, once again working the graveyard shift in order to have daylight hours for painting.

On that rainy day when our house started to break up, Deedie and David and Nat moved into the one-bedroom apartment. Nat, a senior at Cal, slept on the living room couch and stashed her belongings out of sight. She told me that every morning when she went off to class, there was no sign that she lived there. Deedie had left the UC Press and was working on campus at the main library, where she helped Nat get a job. There Nat met Fred Schutz, a Ph.D. candidate in English literature. After a speedy courtship they married on February 29, 1952.

Shortly after Nat’s marriage, one night Deedie and David sat in the living room with their martinis, beaded moisture on the stemmed glasses blurring the submerged green olives. Or at least that’s how I picture the scene. They would have been sitting on the couch that had served Nat as a bed. Lamps were on, casting pools of yellow light.

Fig. 43. Artwork for poster (Downtown), 1951–52 Gouache on paper, 18 × 12 in. (45.7 × 30.5 cm.) Collection of Helen Park Bigelow

I don’t know if Deedie had been thinking through what she was about to propose, or if it came to her all in a flash. As they sipped their drinks and smoked their Camels, Deedie said that since Nat and I were married and gone, they could now manage on her salary. David was forty then, and Deedie told him she thought he should forget about spending any time at all hunting up jobs and making money. He should stop working the graveyard shift and take the opportunity to give his time and energy to painting—all day every day.

Having that kind of freedom had never entered David’s mind. And what of Deedie, he pointed out; she deserved free time, too. But to Deedie, time for painting mattered most. She talked him into accepting her idea, and a way of life began that lasted three years. David called it the Lydia Park Fellowship, and Deedie stayed on at her job in the Inter-Library Loan Department. Because of her, week after month after year passed with David completely free to paint. Almost twenty years earlier he’d written friends expressing his great pleasure because school was out for the summer and two months lay ahead of him, with nothing to do but his own work. Now, because of Deedie, he had years.

The most remarkable ingredient of Deedie’s offer was that she had always yearned for the day when she could quit her job. She longed to stay home, live on her own schedule, and putter around in her house and garden. As the years passed she had grown slowly and deeply exhausted, and she needed time at home the way someone else might need long walks in open country. Yet in spite of her ongoing fatigue and her personal needs, she found it fulfilling to be a part of David’s work in a new, exciting way.

David was the only one who ever mentioned the Lydia Park Fellowship. It was his term, and he honored her in his use of it. Years later, long after David died, I asked her about the sacrifice she had made. She looked at me in surprise and said, “Oh, anybody would have done that.”

Deedie and I were not close in the ways we think of closeness today, nor were she and Nat. I didn’t confide in her, and we never had long talks or spent much time alone together. But we operated in the framework of loving rapport, of being “in cahoots.” That was the essence of our family; we were on the same side, and I liked the way she looked, tall and slender in a straight skirt of brown or navy gabardine, a wide leather belt, and a tailored cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

Deedie had what Nat and I thought of as perfect hair: thick, curly, and a rich mahogany brown except for deep red glints caught by sunlight. At the Santa Barbara Road house, she cut her hair with scissors at the bathroom mirror and shampooed at the kitchen sink. Then she wrapped her hair in a towel, went out to the veranda, and flopped down naked on her stomach on the mattress, which she placed strategically to catch California’s long afternoon sun. She groaned with pleasure and would lie that way for hours, with red lights sparkling in her clean, dark hair. After she and Nat and David moved to the apartment, Deedie must have missed that veranda, although I never heard a complaint.

In 1952, in Ithaca, Bob held down two jobs while going to Cornell. He was an extremely conscientious and hard-working young man, and we hardly saw each other. I don’t remember thinking anything was wrong between us, just that these were hard months, and I counted my blessings about Bob’s many fine qualities. There was also an added bonus—I loved his whole family.

Fig. 44. Deedie on campus, University of California, Berkeley, c. 1952

My birthday is in April, and that year a flat, brown-paper-wrapped package arrived in the mail, addressed by David. Immediately I knew the package was a painting. I ripped away the paper and held up the framed canvas. It had browns and blues and gold and red. I turned it around, trying to “read” it. It wasn’t signed, and for a long moment I didn’t know top from bottom. I thought it was an abstract that hadn’t made it to the dump. I turned the painting one way and then the other.

An image popped into view, just like that. One moment I couldn’t tell if the painting had subject matter, and the next moment there was a profile of Deedie gazing out a window, with light shining on her face. Her dark wavy hair bounded down the back of her head. In the image, as in life, she had seriousness and depth. It was a beautiful painting, a fine likeness. And in years since, I have pondered the fact that my father painted this portrait of my mother and sent it to me on my nineteenth birthday, when I was far away and unhappy, though I hadn’t said a word.

Fig. 45. Profile of Lydia, 1952 Oil on canvas, 13½ × 15½ in. (34.3 × 39.4 cm.) Private collection

Gazing down at the portrait in my lap, I was shaken by a profound sense of connectedness, as if suddenly I was at one with David, a part of his mind and even a part of his hand as he painted. Because he’d noticed. Like the sun, his paintbrush caught the same red glints that I loved in my mother’s hair. He saw what I saw. There was the proof, right there in the painting.

In the summer of 1953, with another couple and a small staff, Bob and I operated a sprawling white inn in the mountains of central New York. Our first child, Terry, was four months old at the beginning of the summer. I rigged up a sling of scarves tied at my hip and carried Terry as I chambermaided, prepped food, baked, gardened, waited tables, washed dishes, and made reservations at our little front desk. In the mornings, I went out to cut fresh flowers from the flowerbeds around the buildings and then made bouquets by the old laundry tubs behind the kitchen. Fortunately, we opened only forty of the inn’s one hundred and ten rooms.

My grandparents were on my mind that summer. They were about to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and Peterborough was a day’s trip away. Deedie and David were driving across the country to attend, but I hadn’t been invited.

David had written to tell me, saying he was “pissed off” that Nat and I hadn’t been included but that Granny and Grandpop thought things would get out of control if all their grandchildren attended. I understood, but had longed to be there. Evenings would be full of music and uproarious charades, with David and Dick and Teddy up to their antics. I was so close and was going to miss it all.

One morning as I headed toward the kitchen with a full basket of cut flowers, my parents’ car, then a Ford “woody,” suddenly appeared on the driveway. There it was in front of me. Impossible. The car stopped and out popped Deedie and David, laughing at me and waving.

Bob came out of the inn with a sweet, triumphant smile, and I grasped that there had been a conspiracy. In a confusion of hugs and laughter, all their explanations came tumbling out—the secret letters, Bob’s efforts to keep me from going to town for errands that morning, a phone call the night before that I almost answered. As I showed Terry off, Deedie and David explained that they were on the fly. Having made a long detour to where we were, they could stay for only a couple of hours. They had a deadline in Peterborough.

I took the flowers out behind the kitchen and plunged their stems into buckets of water. With a pitcher of lemonade, we sat on old white rockers on the big covered porch. In the warm morning, we sipped our drinks and exchanged stories about their long drive and our adventures running the inn.

In the midst of our conversation, David reached over and took Terry off my lap. He stood her on his knees, so that they were eye to eye. They looked each other over. She drooled. He was forty-two that summer and probably taken aback by being a grandfather. He drew in his breath and then, seriously and with great intent, he slowly exhaled a long, juicy, lip-flapping buzz.

My gaze leapt to Terry, whose intensity deepened.

David did it again, longer. “Bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb.”

Bob chuckled. Terry stared solemnly at her grandfather. David cocked his head, looked at her inquisitively, and did it again, like a question: “Bbbbbbbbbbb?”

Terry inhaled, frowned, and answered, “Bbbbbbb.”

By then the rest of us were laughing, but they both ignored us. After a while, with his relationship with Terry established, David handed her back to me. Time was running out, and he wanted to show us the stack of paintings folded in old blankets in the back of the station wagon. They were all new, the first result of the Lydia Park Fellowship.

Carefully, David lifted a painting from the car. He set it on the ground and the blanket fell away. Ah, a beach scene. Bather, sand, surf, the light of a bright sun. The bather had on striped trunks. There was something surprising about the surf. The waves broke in great round brushstrokes that I wanted to stay with, but I was immediately distracted by the next canvas, a rowboat painting David was propping against the running board. Then another painting, being unwrapped by Deedie. The wrapping was an old blanket from Nat’s bed. More paintings emerged from familiar frayed towels. We leaned the paintings against fenders and bumpers. Colors glistened in the hot sun. I moved around, looking at the whole row of paintings against the car. As always when David showed me his work, I was at a loss for words, silenced by my desire to say something meaningful about the work and to acknowledge the significance of the moment.

A few days later, in Peterborough, Grandpop photographed all those paintings. Again, they were in sunlight, leaning against a car, just as they were when I first saw them at the Cragsmoor Inn.

In the image of Deedie doing her nails, David fixed her in a moment of tranquil domestic focus, in the kind of time she longed for and needed. In the rowboat painting, David’s ability to suggest with brushstrokes shows in the windblown hair on the forward figure and the feeling of strain at his neck as he pulls on the oars. The swirling movement of water catches the light. In each painting, David celebrated the ordinary and yet the works were “about” more than their subject matter. Looking at the paintings, I felt as inarticulate as ever and heard myself saying, more than once, “That’s really neat.”

I remembered one night when I was fifteen, sitting in the front seat of the car alone with David. I was telling him something and must have been going on and on when he glanced over at me with arched eyebrow and asked if I were acquainted with any adjectives besides neat.

Fig. 46. Untitled (Deedie Doing Nails) 1952–53 Oil on canvas, size and whereabouts unknown

Fig. 47. The Market, 1952–53 Oil on canvas, 34 × 25 in. (86.4 × 63.5 cm.) Private collection

Fig. 48. Untitled (The Dance), 1952–53 Oil on canvas, size and whereabouts unknown

Fig. 49. Untitled (Rowboat with Boys) 1952–53 Oil on canvas, size and whereabouts unknown

“Quite a few exist that you might consider,” he pointed out.

And there I was, five years later and supposed to be a grownup, telling him his paintings were neat. David didn’t seem to notice. I think he liked showing the work to Bob and me. Too soon, though, someone looked at a watch.

“Ohmygod, we have to go,” Deedie cried, and we wrapped the paintings and placed them back in the station wagon. Hurriedly we hugged good-bye, and Deedie and David got in the car. The engine started. David backed around and headed down the driveway. They were both waving out their windows, Deedie leaning back and blowing kisses, and then they disappeared around a curve.

I stood there feeling left behind and sad, even abandoned. Suddenly I saw that I didn’t belong with Deedie and David as I once had. There they were, a couple in their early forties going off alone. They were young, fresh, and vigorous, full of life. They were looking ahead to the rest of their lives and wherever it was that the Lydia Park Fellowship would lead them. My mother had presented David with the gift of time because she believed in him, and it was paying off.

Terry squirmed and fussed. In a wave of sorrow I didn’t fully understand then, I hurried back to my buckets of flowers.

When David returned to painting the figure, strong features from his early work reemerged, such as a prominent forearm or a certain slant of a figure’s head. As with the seasons of the year, David’s periods of focus affected and were born within each other. The fall of a leaf in autumn, the snow and rain of winter, the blossom of spring all nurture the harvest of summer. In David’s work the Picassoesque face of a thirties violinist emerges simplified and stylized in a forties woman putting on an earring. The burst of thick paint and color in Abstract Expressionist paintings of the late forties turned David toward his new figurative work of the early fifties. Backgrounds of paintings, handling of paint, formation of figures in the late fifties salute the freedom from subject matter of his late forties’ abstractions. And always David’s figures contain something simplified and strong that must have impressed him deeply when he entered the art world of San Francisco, where Diego Rivera and Social Realism had such a profound effect.

Except for a few pieces that survive from David’s childhood, his body of work comes from the thirties, forties, fifties, and up through the summer of 1960. Those three decades were also the thirty-year span of his and Deedie’s marriage. And it is in the 1950s, David’s last decade, that his work took on the full depth and power that had always been apparent in his personality.

Throughout the first half of the 1950s David did a number of portraits. His subjects didn’t sit for the paintings, nor did he work from photographs. He painted from inside, from memory, from his mind’s eye, and the essence of the subject radiates from the canvas, such as Mark Schorer’s poignant, intelligent take on life, and Deedie’s and David’s great friend Piquette Cushing’s austerity and infinite kindness.

Fig. 50. Portrait of Mark S., 1955–57 Oil on canvas, 16 × 10 in. (40.6 × 25.4 cm.) Private collection

Fig. 51. Portrait of Mrs. C., 1958 Oil on canvas, 18 × 12 in. (45.7 × 30.5 cm.) Collection of Jennifer Cushing Curtis

On her birthday in 1958, Piquette arrived home after an evening out. The path up to her Berkeley house was a staggered series of brick steps darkened by large old trees. It wasn’t until she got within a few feet of the front porch that she saw something leaning against the door frame. She could make out a canvas with its painted surface to the wall. She picked it up. She must have smelled it; she must have known it was from David.

She opened the door, flicked on the hall light, and turned the painted surface toward her. Forty years later she told Nat and me that there never was such a moment as that. Being given a painting from David on her birthday was so overwhelming that for a minute she was just looking down at something with a lot of red, and then she grasped that she was seeing her own head, her own face, her portrait. In it, David fully captured the essence of Piquette.

David had a friend who was a member of San Francisco society, and one year she commissioned him to do a portrait. When she saw the painting, still unfinished, she disliked it and withdrew the commission. David knew this could happen any time. To paint someone’s portrait in a way that makes the subject uncomfortable is always possible. He finished but chose not to exhibit the painting.

Since his death it has been shown widely, was owned by a collector, and was then given to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It has received critical notice and acclaim. Probably that acclaim has something to do with what the subject didn’t care for in the image. There she is, a rather elegant woman in black, with white pearls. She holds her cigarette, her fingernails bright red. Across her mouth are two slashes of red. Perhaps it is the extreme amount of lipstick that gives the painting a certain rasp, and makes it, in my view, harsh. But that very quality is also the painting’s strength.

The photographer Imogen Cunningham and David had known each other for years, and in the late 1950s they were inspired to trade portraits. David had been asked for pictures of himself, for catalogues and such, and few existed; we’d never been a photographing family. I don’t know whose idea it was to trade portraits of each other, but trading was something David was grateful to be able to do, mostly to pay off doctor bills. With Imogen, however, the exchange was of two artists’ great gifts, hers with camera, his with paint. So Imogen came to the house, a tiny woman with sparking energy, and upstairs in the studio she shot a series of images of David. They are superb. However, there is one shot in which Imogen posed David outside, so that he faced the camera through low-branching boughs of a tree. To me, David looks uncomfortable in that one picture, and it’s easy to imagine that he didn’t like the pose or like being stuck there in that tree. I think it felt unnatural and I cannot imagine that he didn’t say so.

Fig. 52. Woman with Red Mouth, 1954 Oil on canvas, 28½ × 24 in. (71.1 × 61 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Bequest of Edith S. and Arthur J. Levin

Fig. 53. David Park, c. 1958 Photograph by Imogen Cunningham ©The Imogen Cunningham Trust

Fig. 54. David Park in tree, c. 1958 Photograph by Imogen Cunningham ©The Imogen Cunningham Trust

Imogen did not sit for the portrait of her that David made. As in all of David’s portraits, it was painted from the image of her in his mind. Across the top of the canvas he printed her name, Imogen Cunningham. The likeness is wonderful, full of life and of the essence of that great photographer. But the existence of her painted name across the top of the canvas creates a permanent question. David never did that on any other portrait. Why Imogen’s?

Although David never had his portrait subjects sit for him, he liked sketching from models or doing quick studies in pencil or ink wash—India ink applied with a wet watercolor brush. During the last half of the fifties, he and Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn often drew together, sometimes pooling their money and hiring a model, either male or female. David drew with pencil or ink wash, and some of the poses and drawings later inspired paintings.

Fig. 55. Portrait of Imogen, 1956 Oil on canvas, 15⅞ × 12 in. (40.3 × 30.5 cm.) Private collection

One drawing-session model was a woman named Bergie, a student at Cal working in the library. She met Deedie there, and the two of them grew fond of each other. Something in Bergie’s carriage caught Deedie’s eye, and she recognized a potential model. One day she asked Bergie if she would consider posing for Elmer and David and Dick. Bergie confided that she had never taken her clothes off in front of a man, but she trusted Deedie and agreed to give modeling a try. The resulting painting, Nude, Green, is owned by the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

Fig. 56. Nude, Green, 1957 Oil on canvas, 68 × 56⅜ in. (172.7 × 143.2 cm.) Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Julian Eisenstein, Washington D.C., 1975

Fig. 57. Study for Nude, Green, 1957 Ink on paper, 12 × 9 in. (30.5 × 22.9 cm.) Courtesy of Capra Press, 155 Canon View Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93108 (805) 969-0203

Fig. 58. Book jacket, Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, New York Review Books, 2004. ©1962 by Dorothy Baker, copyright renewed © 1990 by Howard Baker, Joan Fry, and Ellen Rupp

In a wonderful postscript to the story of Nude, Green, New York Review Books decided to publish a paperback edition of Dorothy Baker’s last novel, Cassandra at the Wedding, published first in 1962. Dorothy had just completed Cassandra at the time of David’s final illness and she dedicated the book to him. And then more than forty years later came a request from NYRB for permission to use Nude, Green on the cover of the paperback reissue of Dorothy’s book.

In the first year or two of Nat’s marriage, Fred asked David if he would do a portrait of them. Nat was shocked, so foreign was it for either one of us to think of asking that of David. Then three years later, Bob asked David to draw our two daughters, Terry and Kathy, who were about five and three. David came over one day and made some sketches of them as they played and were just around, not posed, although in the sketches David placed the girls sitting at a table. In both cases, the painting of Nat and Fred and the sketches of my children, the work lacks those qualities I expect in David’s work—the vitality, the confidence. I think he didn’t want to do that painting or those sketches, but he was very fond of his sons-in-law and supportive of them. He would not have refused their requests.

People have asked me if I mind not having a painting of me by my father. Before he died, I didn’t give any thought to whether or not he’d painted me. I accepted his explanation. He liked to paint bodies and faces that were more “lived in” than Nat’s and mine. I had grown up with David’s right to choose his own subject matter. Composers listen for their melodies, writers dream up their stories, painters look for their pictures.

Fig. 59. Portrait of Nat & Fred, 1952 Oil on canvas, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm.) Private collection

When David died, I was not old enough yet, at twenty-seven, to hear many of my own thoughts when they had to do with my father. I didn’t know I would have loved a portrait of myself. I didn’t know how extremely interested and moved I would be to look at a painting like the Mark Schorer portrait—only have it be my face there before me, with its quirks and lines and expressions. It would probably startle me with truth about myself and how my father saw me. With his loaded brush, what in my face would he give to a canvas, to be seen, over time, by strangers? It didn’t happen, and now I wish it had. It took me years to recognize this.

David painted Deedie many times. A recurring theme in his work was the image of an ordinary domestic moment: a woman irons, or writes a letter, or sews. In the paintings the woman is often warmed by the light of a lamp. Her face is Deedie’s. She is close, not distant, but at the same time removed, occupied within herself the way some of Vermeer’s women are. The paintings tell me that David loved these quiet domestic moments and pulled his subject matter from them much as he pulled wooded and watery scenes with rowboats and canoes from his childhood on New Hampshire’s ponds.

Fig. 60. Woman Ironing, c. 1957 Ink wash on paper, 14½ × 11 in. (36.8 × 27.9 cm.) Private collection

Fig. 61. Portrait of Lydia Sewing, 1958 Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 in. (61.0 × 50.8 cm.) Private collection

Fig. 62. Canoe, 1958 Oil on canvas, 50 × 56 in. (127 × 142.2 cm.) Private collection

Fig. 63. The Band, 1955 Oil on canvas, 32 × 64 in. (81.3 × 162.6 cm.) Private collection

Deedie’s face also appears in paintings of nudes, of bathers, of people in a crowd. The general look of Deedie became the quintessential David Park face of woman, and it occurs to me that people who are well acquainted with David’s work can close their eyes at any moment and see my mother’s face.

In 1955, four years and two children into my marriage, we were living in the Bay Area again, in Orinda, twenty minutes east of Berkeley. One night soon after we moved in, Deedie and David came for supper. I was in the kitchen as they arrived, and I saw them park in the driveway and wrestle a big painting out of the car. I saw a flash of browns and creams. Holding the painting carefully, as if it were still wet, David carried it to the front door where I met him with my heart thudding. He said, “Hi, kiddo,” and set the painting on the floor. It snapped into full view for me, a marvelous large painting of the Dixieland jazz band. “Happy housewarming,” David said. The painting was a perfect choice for us, because my husband sometimes played drums in the band.

I said, “Oh my God,” and sank down cross-legged on the floor in front of the painting. It was a case of love at first sight.

For forty-seven years that painting was on my wall, and recently I sold it. It was an excruciating decision. While waiting for the painting to be picked up, I set it on the floor and sat close in front of it to take it in one last time. Only then did I remember that first moment when David brought it to me.

My sister has felt the same way about selling a painting. Long ago David gave her a painting that had great meaning to both of us, called Boston Street Scene (following page). She sold it on the advice of David’s New York gallery at a time when it was important to introduce such a fine David Park painting into the marketplace.

Nat and I both hope that someday those paintings will be publicly displayed and many people can see them, not just our family and friends. This is how it should be. People ask me what it was like to sell a painting after having it most of my life, and the answer is that when I sold The Band I was split in half. It was exciting to send the painting off to new owners who were thrilled about having it. In the transaction, I was extremely aware of David, and what it would mean to him. At the same time I knew I would miss the painting. It was my “familiar.” But actually, I’m not without it. The image is inside of me. I can see it whenever I want, wherever I am. Just the other day I glimpsed a certain blue-green in something in my house, and it brought to mind the same blue-green I’d known in The Band, on the headstock of the banjo where the tuning pegs are.

I was twenty-two when David gave me that painting, and he was forty-four. He and I were born in double-digit years, 1911 and 1933. In that forty-fourth year of David’s life, the Lydia Park Fellowship came to the best possible conclusion. David’s paintings—deeper and stronger, valued and exhibited—resulted in an invitation to join the faculty of the Art Department at the University of California in Berkeley. We were all delighted by the fact that David, who had left high school without a diploma but filled with dedication, would now be teaching at a leading university. For Deedie especially, all her faith was validated.

David enjoyed teaching and approached his new job eagerly. He loved the students and the stimulus of a classroom so full of serious endeavor. He and Deedie started house hunting, eager to move out of the small apartment. But the search went badly, and Deedie confided how dismal she felt. Even with the new job they had little money, and the only places they could afford were ugly, small, and “jammed up against other buildings.”

Fig 64. Boston Street Scene, 1954 Oil on canvas, 45⅝ × 59 in. (115.9 × 149.9 cm.) Private collection

“I get tired of it,” she said, it meaning always being broke. This is the only time I heard Deedie complain about money, even though they were down to nothing at the end of each month. When a painting sold, the two hundred dollars it might bring was a bonanza that helped for many weeks.

Deedie kept on looking for a house to buy, or at least a better place to rent, and then David’s father offered to help with a down payment. The three thousand miles between Berkeley and Boston helped David and Grandpop keep a respectful distance, which lasted the rest of David’s life. The distance blurred disappointment and concern that existed between the two men. David wished his father could grasp the importance of art in his life, while Grandpop worried that David’s focus on painting didn’t provide him or his wife and children with financial security. Yet Grandpop generously gave money to Deedie and David. At Christmas there was usually a check for a hundred dollars, a lot of money then, and once a year or so another check came, just as a gift.

The offer of money for a down payment made it possible for Deedie and David to buy their own place. Soon after the offer, friends heard of a charming little brown-shingled house that was going to be for sale in the hills behind the campus, on La Vereda Road. As Deedie and David drove along the narrow winding streets they fell in love with the neighborhood. They already wanted to buy the house before they even saw it. And then it was perfect—within walking distance of the campus, close enough to hear the chimes from the campanile, with a neighborhood of old gardens and views of the bay. Most important of all, the entire upstairs of the new house was one large room with big windows that faced north, perfect for a spacious studio complete with sink and bathroom.

A sunny side yard consisted of a small, round dichondra lawn. Many times when I visited Deedie and David, we all three crouched on the dichondra, weeding out blades of grass. Those hours of weeding and deadheading flowers were deeply satisfying and peaceful, even though sometimes we hardly said a word. Terraced flowerbeds rose up the hillside from the lawn, spilling little white daisies and bright yellow nasturtiums over rock walls.

Fig. 65. Sink, 1956 Oil on canvas, 20 × 18 in. (50.8 × 45.7 cm.) Estate of Phyllis Diebenkorn

Fig. 66. Still Life with Hammer, 1956 Oil on canvas, 14 × 10 in. (35.6 × 25.4 cm.) Private collection

Downstairs, the house had its large living room and a bathroom, a small kitchen, the bedroom, and French doors that opened to a balcony where Deedie and David put a big clay pot of red geraniums. The living room comfortably held the piano, home now after years of being stored by friends. David played almost every day, and old favorites like Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 16 in C Major once again poured into the house. This was an added pleasure for Deedie, who had finally been able to quit her job and stay home.

I happened to drop in on Deedie and David in their first days at La Vereda Road, right after they had ripped out a fake stucco front of a fireplace and exposed a beautiful old brick chimney. They were excited and a little giddy from having just finished cleaning up the mess and putting the room back together. I was impressed that David was so handy with hammer and saw, momentarily forgetting that in the early years he’d made most of our furniture. He laughed at his own pride as we walked around examining the chimney and everything he’d changed.

I see that time in his life reflected in a short but potent exploration of the still life. David painted a hammer, his studio sink, and a spectacular painting of a hairbrush and comb, a painting long since sold but which everyone in the family yearns for.

Fig. 67. Brush and Comb, 1956 Oil on canvas, 13¾ × 17 in. (34.9 × 43.2 cm.) Private collection

The decade of the 1950s was an exciting time of creativity for my parents and their friends. Dick Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff soon followed David in returning to the figure, and all of them had their work shown at museums throughout the Bay Area. More and more often, each of them was invited to jury various shows. Their work was included in exhibitions in other parts of the country. Collectors made purchases. As the three men became better known, they put on no airs. They continued to be deeply interested in one another’s work and shy when expected to talk about their paintings. In 1957, Paul Mills, then director of the Oakland Art Museum, presented a landmark exhibition he called Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting—notably the first use of that term. The show contained works by David, Dick, and Elmer, along with other painters, several of them students who had also left the non-objective style in favor of painting the figure. For the exhibition catalogue, David made a statement about his return to the figure as subject matter.

As you grow older, it dawns on you that you are yourself—that your job is not to force yourself into a style, but to do what you want. I saw that if I would accept subjects, I could paint with more absorption, with a certain enthusiasm for the subject which would allow some of the esthetic qualities such as color and composition to evolve more naturally. With subjects, I feel a natural development of the painting rather than a formal, self-conscious one.

All my life I’ve felt the regard David’s friends had for his ideas and way of thinking, a regard fully reciprocated by David. Back in the early years, when Dorothy Baker wrote Young Man with a Horn, it was with real admiration that David spoke of Dorothy spending night after night sitting in speakeasies in New York City, soaking up the jazz and impressions of the musicians. Her book was published in 1938, with David’s small drawing of a horn on the book jacket. At that time Howard and Dorothy were living in the apartment next to ours in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My sister and I watched with fascination as David and Howard made a “chair” by a four-way clasp of hand over wrist and carried Dorothy up the narrow stairs when she came home from the hospital after the Bakers’ first child, Ellen, was born.

In 1987, in a catalogue for Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in New York (the second of two shows at Salander-O’Reilly; the first occurred in 1985), Howard Baker wrote of Deedie and David: “It seemed only natural . . . for Dorothy Baker and me to move in with them in Brookline while we were hunting for a place to live in Cambridge; it was equally natural for them to move next door to us on Frost Street a year or so later.”

Howard also wrote that “the Parks brought music and art, all that sort of thing, with them wherever they were.” I have the copy of Young Man with a Horn that Dorothy gave my parents. On the flyleaf she wrote, “To David and Lydia without whom this book could never have been wrote.” David loved the inscription and when he showed it off, it was always with a big belly laugh.

Fig. 68. Book jacket, Young Man with a Horn by Dorothy Baker Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938

For my parents and their friends, the 1950s produced a great outrush of creativity. That decade has somehow developed the stigma of being a time of sluggish creativity, but the opposite was true in Deedie’s and David’s lives. Mark Schorer and Dorothy Baker were writing and publishing new works, and in 1952 Young Man with a Horn was made into a film starring Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall. Charles Cushing composed music to be presented by the San Francisco Symphony. Charles also produced Darius Milhaud’s opera The Sorrows of Orpheus at the Hertz Theater on the UC Berkeley campus, and for the production David painted abstracted background stage sets. Cocktail hour and dinner-table talk resonated with the process of all this good work—the frustrations and failures, and the wonderful sense of sometimes getting something right.

One of David’s strong paintings from 1957, The Table, always reminds me of the spirit of creative energy around my parents and their friends. Dinner would be over and the last morsel gone, but no one would break the mood to get up and clear the dishes. People would all be so engrossed they’d sit around the table for another hour or more. I sense those times from this painting: the coffee’s been poured and a plate pushed aside, and everyone sits there talking.

In The Table, perhaps more than any other painting up to that time, David celebrates the color white—in tablecloth and dishware, in clothing, in light. In the figure on the right, with his back to the viewer, David’s ability to suggest is in high gear in his abstracted handling of the separation of the shoulder from the surface of the dinner table and in the neckline of the shirt on the figure at the left. However, it is not the details or the subjects that set this dinner-table scene in a timeless moment. It isn’t the light shining over the figures. Something else happens in the cumulative effect of paint, light, and color. For me, the impact of The Table is far larger than the sum of its ingredients—the impact is about mood and the soul-sustaining bond with friends.

In the mid-fifties, from my suburban tract house in an old pear orchard in Orinda, what happened at Deedie and David’s house was like a magnet. Being there connected me to the person I had been instead of the suburban housewife I had become. I always felt forlorn driving home. Those were the years in which I had babies and miscarriages and a husband off at work almost every day and night, and my creative life consisted of occasionally having enough inspiration to can a few quarts of pears.

One evening when I’d left my children with a sitter and gone to Deedie and David’s for supper, Mark Schorer and David got to talking about autographed copies of books. The martinis had been flowing and suddenly David and Mark started pulling books off the shelves and signing them. “This is going to excite the hell out of some used-book seller someday,” one or the other of them said, reaching for a copy of Lost Horizon and signing it “Best ever, James.” Things got more and more hilarious: “Fondly, John S.” “Cheers, Ernest.” “Gratefully, R. L. S.” And even, “Always, Booth.”

That quirky humor was one of David’s strong points. Someone once took a snapshot when he happened to be sitting next to Ruth Schorer in a garden. She was leaning against his knee and he was smiling down at her. At the end of the year they had the snapshot made into a card and sent it to all their friends, inscribed “Ruth Schorer and David Park wish you a very Happy New Year.”

Fig. 69. The Table, 1957 Oil on canvas, 52 × 40 in. (132.1 × 101.6 cm.) Private collection

As the years passed, David continued to do an occasional portrait. Perhaps the most evocative of all are those he painted of his two great friends and cohorts, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn (pages 110 and 111).

Elmer played cornet in the Dixieland jazz band in which David played piano. When the band rehearsed at our house, I discovered that condensation gathered inside the bell of a cornet and I took it upon myself to see that Elmer had a towel to put on the floor where the horn would drip. I adored Elmer. One foggy San Francisco evening when I was a high school kid waiting for David to get off work at the School, Elmer took me on the back of his motorcycle, carefully I’m sure, up and down the steep hills around what is now the San Francisco Art Institute. Elmer and Dick were both such sweet men. I loved Dick, too. He was shyer than Elmer and there was something very special about him.

Fig. 70. Female with Arms Raised 1955–59 Ink wash on paper, 17 × 14 in. (43.2 × 35.6 cm.) Collection of Helen Park Bigelow

Fig. 71. Seated Male, 1955–59 Ink wash on paper, 17 × 14 in. (43.2 × 35.6 cm.) Collection of Helen Park Bigelow

I have a picture in my mind of an evening with Phyllis Diebenkorn and Deedie. David and Elmer and Dick were upstairs with a model, having a drawing session in the studio of the house on La Vereda Road. Deedie and Phyllis each sat in a corner of the couch, curled up facing each other and talking quietly. Upstairs we heard the occasional murmur or footfall or scrape of the leg of a chair. You can’t hear intensity but it had drifted down the stairs and was almost tangible in the room. Sometimes after sessions David or Elmer or Dick would bring drawings down to look at while they had a nightcap, and sometimes drawings ended up on the studio floor, gradually acquiring footprints.

Fig. 72. Elmer Bischoff. Sketch of David Park, 1957 Ink on paper, 12 × 9 in. (30.5 × 22.9 cm.) Courtesy of Adelie Bischoff. Photograph by M. Lee Fatherree

After David died, on the few occasions when I saw Elmer and Dick, their big hugs and the warmth in their eyes spoke again of their bond with my father. In all the years since, when I have stood looking at David’s paintings of Elmer and Dick, I search the faces, the brushstrokes, the light, to pull forth again a sense of the friendship from which these paintings emerged. And it is with the greatest pleasure that I find an ink wash drawing of my father by Elmer Bischoff in Susan Landauer’s 2001 book, Elmer Bischoff: The Ethics of Paint. In the drawing Elmer caught David’s thoughtfulness, his depth, and also the terrible fatigue that foreshadowed the future.

I’ve been asked if David ever made a self-portrait, and the question brings back a night when Deedie and David were in their mid-forties—a good-looking, brown-haired couple coming out to my house for dinner. There they were at the front door, and David held out a painting canvas side up and said he wanted to “borrow” some wall space so that he could see the work out of the context of his studio.

It was almost square, about two feet by two feet. I set it on top of a bookcase, and then I saw that it was a self-portrait. A shiver went up my arms. The image, not quite centered in a deep blue background, was of a head, neck, and the suggestion of a white T-shirt collar. The likeness and the “Davidness” were remarkable. Somehow he’d captured his own peppery vigor. The painting had what my youngest daughter, Peg, calls “David’s depth of face.”

Fig. 73. Portrait of Richard Diebenkorn, 1958 Oil on canvas, 20 × 18 in. (50.8 × 45.7 cm.) In the Collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of Lydia Park Moore, wife of the artist 1971.4.2

Fig. 74. Portrait of Elmer Bischoff, 1958 Oil on canvas, 22 × 20 in. (55.9 × 50.8 cm.) In the Collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of Lydia Park Moore, wife of the artist

Fig. 75. David Park beside painting Head of Lydia, c. 1958. Photograph by Imogen Cunningham ©The Imogen Cunningham Trust

Fig. 76. Self-portrait, n.d. Graphite on paper, 8 × 7 in. (20.3 × 17.8 cm.) Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of the Estate of Marian Simpson A79.23.502

I loved it, but David wasn’t sure. He said he’d felt silly painting it. A few weeks passed, and he took the self-portrait home.

A year or two later, he gave me a portrait of my mother he called Head of Lydia (fig. 77), an almost square painting about two feet by two feet, and predominantly blue. As in his self-portrait, the head is in creams and tans and many other colors, the blue background deep and complex. It’s a somber and magnificent painting of my mother, thick with paint, a fine likeness that shows her as stern and strong, yet vulnerable. Here is the woman who long ago went naked with her women friends for an entire week, who uncomplainingly stretched our dollars and our ration stamps, who kept the house welcoming and comfortable and who also kept the paychecks coming in, who believed in David, and who sipped gin and grapefruit juice all day.

In the painting her gaze is far-seeing and steady, although up close you cannot make out an eye at all. What’s there is just a splotch of blue, a jog of black, and far too many other colors to make any sense. The ear is just a squiggle with his paintbrush, but he made it work.

Imogen Cunningham photographed David standing beside Head of Lydia. It’s a somber picture, bringing to mind something of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. This is the only example I know of where we can compare one of David’s works in progress with the finished result, for the final painting has a much-changed treatment of the neck and collar from what we see in the photograph.

I always assumed that the canvas was the same one David used for his self-portrait, but I didn’t happen to ask. David often reused a canvas after deciding against a painting, and the self-portrait is gone. To my knowledge, it was the only serious oil painting he ever did of himself; once, though, he did a humorous pencil-on-paper sketch.

Fig. 77. Head of Lydia, 1958 Oil on canvas, 25¼ × 24 in. (64.1 × 61 cm.) Private collection

Museum conservators have examined Head of Lydia with X-ray, ultraviolet, and infrared techniques. Although it appears that there was another painting beneath my mother’s image, no details show. I can only wonder. And I also wonder what I would do if I had proof that the self-portrait lay preserved underneath my mother’s image, if by removal of her image, his could be recovered.

I know what David would do if he knew his image could be reclaimed. He’d leave things as they are. I loved the self-portrait but he didn’t, and he did like Head of Lydia. But there is something else. All her life, through her second marriage and until her death, Deedie kept David “behind her.” He was like an armature for her. His strength and integrity sustained her. That day back on Telegraph Hill when David was covered with poison oak blisters, he entered Deedie’s life and never left it. At the end, when she was eighty and very sick, when her husband, Roy Moore, was out of the room, she used to grasp my sister’s hand or mine and say, “Your father was the love of my life.”

My daughter’s phrase “David’s depth of face” comes to mind when I sit looking at the painting of my mother. The whole question of what might lie underneath its surface heightens my senses. I have before me David’s ability to reach deeply into an individual face and reveal what the face is: a window into the psyche, a canvas for every emotion.

With all my heart I wish I’d thought to photograph the self-portrait while it was on my wall. For that matter, I wish I’d thought to photograph the good-looking young couple with the whole world ahead of them, standing in my doorway holding out a painting.

Looking back on David’s literary and cultural resources, I know that he barely listened to the radio, preferring to scan the morning San Francisco Chronicle for news. He didn’t sit down and read the paper except for articles that were important to him—art reviews, book reviews, the latest political issues. With the exception of the Sunday Philharmonic broadcasts, he didn’t tune the radio to music stations because music for him was never something in the background. Music was a main event, heard at a concert or heard on an old 78 rpm record player which we called the Victrola, a holdover name from the first wind-up record players in Deedie’s and David’s childhood homes. When David wanted to hear some music he put the record on, sat down, and, with almost palpable attention, he listened.

In a handwritten statement appearing in Staempfli Gallery’s inaugural exhibition catalogue in 1959, David wrote:

I have short spurts of reading—usually prompted by a friend’s enthusiasm for some good work—but these are so rare that usually when discovered reading my wife will ask me if I feel sick. One book every two years is about my speed.

David’s “one book every two years” was an understatement, but he didn’t set aside much time for reading. He had a retentive mind and could discuss characterizations and themes and subthemes years after reading a book. Often something inspired him to recite a sonnet or a line from a play. He once scribbled a bit of the score of a Bach piece on a letter to Charles Cushing asking if his memory were correct. Charles replied that it was.

He browsed through the New Yorker each week, getting caught by some articles and then devouring them. He enjoyed the little clips from periodicals with commentary by the New Yorker that appear at the bottoms of columns and would often read one aloud. Two or three recent issues always lay on the coffee table. The magazine was a big part of my parents’ lives, its international reach serving as their wick to the world. Week after week one or the other of them would say, as if wonderfully surprised, “Oh, the new New Yorker came.”

Although Deedie and David didn’t attend many films, I happen to know the last movie David ever saw, in the fall of 1959. It was The Mouse That Roared, playing at the Elmwood Theater on College Avenue in Berkeley. Friends had seen the film and told Deedie and David not to miss it. So they went. I saw David the next day. Not only was it unusual for him to go to a movie, I was astonished that he’d been able to sit through it because he was having back troubles. I told him I hadn’t seen the film.

“You haven’t?” he said incredulously. He’d loved the movie and urged me to go. He said he’d left the theater with a grin on his face, a fine way to feel after what turned out to be the last cultural excursion of his life.

The 1950s, David’s final decade, were the years in which he came into his full strength as a painter. All of us, his friends and family, watched as his paintings made their way onto the living room walls. By 1956 and 1957, the work was undergoing another change. For all my life, with the exception of the nonobjective period, David’s details had fascinated me—the hand on the fret board, the back of a chair. They’d pulled my attention onto the canvas and given me a whole journey into what my father noticed, but now they were gone.

The paintings were still figurative, the thick paint still lush and sculptural, the light still vibrant. But the well from which David painted had deepened. After he started teaching at UC Berkeley, and I was living in Orinda, one day Deedie telephoned and said, with awe in her voice, that I should come in to Berkeley and see the latest paintings, adding that in her view something was happening—she couldn’t explain what it was—but that it was something.

Fig. 78. Riverbank, 1956 Oil on canvas, 59⅝ × 69 in. (151.4 × 177 cm.) Williams College Museum of Art (77.9.75). Bequest of Lawrence H. Bloedel, Class of 1923

Fig. 79. Four Women, 1959 Oil on canvas, 57 × 75⅜ in. (144.8 × 191.5 cm.) Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 2014.1.007

The ability to stop in frequently and look at a new painting was a gift that came from living close by. David would be upstairs painting, hear us, and come down. Or we’d go up to the studio and look at the paintings there. The images were strong, filled with sureness and vitality. The figures might be in action, such as bathers drying off with a towel, but the action was not the driving force, not the focus. There was a pensive quality to the figures, deep, wordless, and unselfconscious. In the early fifties, about the painting Sunbather (fig. 37), David had written that he wanted the figure to be heavy with relaxation. His new figures were heavy with being, with their inescapable human condition of life and place.

Fig. 80. Daphne, 1959 Oil on canvas, 75 × 57 in. (190.5 × 144.8 cm.) Collection of Mr. & Mrs. James R. Patton, Jr.

Fig. 81. Figure with Fence, 1953 Oil on canvas, 35 × 49 in. (88.9 × 124.5 cm) Private collection

In 1959 the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco held a large exhibit simply called David Park, and for the exhibition catalogue David said this about painting:

I think of painting—in fact all the arts—as a sort of extension of human life. The very same things that we value most, the ideals of humanity, are the properties of the arts. The words that come to mind are many—energy, wisdom, courage, delight, humor, sympathy, gentleness, honesty, peace, freedom—I believe most artists are goaded by a vision of making their work vivid and alive with such qualities. I believe this is the undercurrent of the artist’s energy.

Those values were the undercurrent of David’s life. Because of show catalogues we have these statements from him in his last decade. As with the depth of beauty in a much-loved scene in nature, a mountain view or the sea, for me those thoughts of David’s have deepened over time.

Fig. 82. Dark Head, 1960 Gouache on paper, 13½ × 10⅝ in. (34.3 × 27 cm.) Private collection