—First full-length book in two decades devoted to the art and life of this important American artist. Includes more than 90 plates illustrating Park's development and career —Park's paintings have seen a resurgence of interest among collectors and institutions, with 2009 exhibitions at Washington's Phillips Collection and Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center; pieces recently auctioned for $2.7 million at Christie's and $1.4 million at Sotheby's David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back chronicles the brief but remarkably prolific career of this American artist, who died in 1960 at age 49. He was an integral part of the San Francisco Bay art community from the early 1930s on, and is counted as one of the group of immensely gifted artists who made up the Bay Area Figurative Painting movement in its nascent years of the 1950s. A painter deeply committed to humanity as a subject in an era that exalted abstraction, Park's work can be startling for its depth of feeling even today. Writing about him recently, San Francisco critic Kenneth Baker noted: Park's freedom from irony will strike anyone sated by postmodernist flippancy as enviable and almost beyond achievement today.
Helen Park Bigelow, daughter of the well-known painter David Park, has written fiction and personal essays for most of her life. She has been studying her father's work for decades, absorbing and reflecting on the nuance and layers of his passion to paint.
Her writings have appeared in various publications including The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, the Monterey Herald, House Beautiful, and the Museum of California Magazine. Her essay in House Beautiful was included in the magazine's 1995 anthology Thoughts of Home.
Bigelow, 76, earned her living making pottery in the Bay Area for many years. She has three daughters and four grandchildren and lives on the island of Maui with her husband of thirty years, Edward B. Bigelow. "The rainbows often interrupt me," Bigelow says, "but somehow I still keep on writing."
