Painting Collection David Park The Prophet (1911—1960) In 1949, at the age of 39, artist David Park famously piled his paintings into his car and drove them to the city dump in Berkeley, CA. Park had been working in an Abstract Expressionist style—the dominant mode of painting at that time—and disposed of his canvases to mark a dramatic shift away from abstraction and towards capturing the human form. Throughout the 1950s, Park painted figures he saw in his everyday life, from children playing and musicians performing to close-cropped portraits, such as The Prophet. He once said: “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 Prophet depicts a figure from the neck up, with its arm raised and mouth open, as if caught in the act of speaking. The subject is subsumed in deep fields of red and blue on a surface slathered with thick, luscious paint, which accumulates in the edges and corners of the work. |
  
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