Bruce Alanson McGaw (born 1935), [1] is an American painter and educator. He is part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, and is professor emeritus of the San Francisco Art Institute. He studied in the 1950's at the California College of the Arts with Richard Diebenkorn and others. [2] [3]
Bruce Alanson McGaw was born on April 5, 1935 in Berkeley, California, and was raised in Albany, California. [4] He graduated from Albany High School in 1949. [4] He studied with Fred Martin while in high school. [4]
In 1955, at age 18, McGaw attended classes at California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in Oakland, and was in the institution’s first class taught by Richard Diebenkorn after Diebenkorn's return to California from the East Coast. He graduated in 1957 with a BFA degree[ citation needed ]
By 1957, McGaw had moved more deeply into representational work and the handling of the human figure that would come drive his work for the next half-century. This energetic observational direction drew from the energy of the other Bay Area figurative artists active at the time including David Park (painter) and Elmer Bischoff. [3]
In describing his relationship to teaching and his own painting practice McGaw states, "Painting is one of the oldest of human activities and remains vital and essential. Its wonder is related to the challenges and difficulties of its physical limitations, its constrained format and fixed facture, always totally present, a poetry of sight. Painting taps the deepest and most considered resources of its maker." [2]
McGaw's work consists largely of medium to large-scale oil paintings and charcoal drawings featuring human figures in moments of quite repose, still lives of vignettes found often in his studio and landscapes capturing the powerful light of the San Francisco Bay Area cast on the mixed industrial and working-class suburbs of East Bay towns like Emeryville, California. An avid student of art history and poetry he cites significant texts and relationships with colleagues among the most important influences in his studio practice. [3]
McGaw continues to paint and draw in the studio he built in 1990 in the Oakland Hills. [3]
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately 220 undergraduates and 112 graduate students were enrolled in 2021. The institution was accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), and was a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD). The school closed permanently in July 2022.
Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim. Art critic Michael Kimmelman described Diebenkorn as "one of the premier American painters of the postwar era, whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces of California, where he spent virtually his entire life."
David Park was an American painter and a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative Movement in painting during the 1950s.
Elmer Nelson Bischoff, was an American visual artist, from the San Francisco Bay Area. Bischoff, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, was part of the post-World War II generation of artists who started as abstract painters and found their way back to figurative art.
The Bay Area Figurative Movement was a mid-20th-century art movement made up of a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who abandoned working in the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a return to figuration in painting during the 1950s and onward into the 1960s.
Manuel John Neri Jr. was an American sculptor who is recognized for his life-size figurative sculptures in plaster, bronze, and marble. In Neri's work with the figure, he conveys an emotional inner state that is revealed through body language and gesture. Since 1965 his studio was in Benicia, California; in 1981 he purchased a studio in Carrara, Italy, for working in marble. Over four decades, beginning in the early 1970s, Neri worked primarily with the same model, Mary Julia Klimenko, creating drawings and sculptures that merge contemporary concerns with Modernist sculptural forms.
Roy De Forest was an American painter, sculptor, and teacher. He was involved in both the Funk art and Nut art movements in the Bay Area of California. De Forest's art is known for its quirky and comical fantasy lands filled with bright colors and creatures, most commonly dogs.
Henry Pierre Villierme was an American Californian painter associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Villierme was considered one of the "Second Generation" members of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Villierme first rose to prominence with a series of successful exhibitions in the late 1950s. From the 1960s to the 1980s Villierme continued to paint and sculpt in his studio, and in the late 1980s returned to public exhibitions.
William Theophilus Brown was an American artist. He became prominent as a member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
Arthur Okamura was an American artist, working in screen printing, drawing and painting. He lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and was Professor Emeritus at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California. His work is in the permanent collections at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. He illustrated numerous works of literature and poetry, published a book on games and toys for children, and created illustrations for the TV movie The People.
Frank Lobdell (1921–2013) was an American painter, often associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement and Bay Area Abstract Expressionism.
Walter Kuhlman (1918–2009) was a 20th-century American painter and printmaker. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he was a core member of the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism. He later worked in a representational style related to American Figurative Expressionism.
Roland Conrad Petersen is a Danish-born American painter, printmaker, and professor. His career spans over 50 years, primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area and is perhaps best-known for his "Picnic series" beginning in 1959 to today. He is part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.
The Walter and McBean Galleries were located at in Russian Hill, as part of the former San Francisco Art Institute's Chestnut campus. It has presented an influential program of exhibitions highlighting innovative work by emerging artists and experimental work by more established artists, from throughout the United States and abroad.
John Dubrow is an American painter.
Fred Thomas Martin was an American artist, writer and arts administrator and educator who was active in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene since the late 1940s. He was a driving force of the Bay Area art scene from the mid 1950s until his retirement from the San Francisco Art Institute. In addition to his artistic practice, Martin was widely known for his work as a longtime administrator and Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI).
James Darrell Northrup Weeks was an American artist and an early member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Unlike many artists in the movement, Weeks was never known for painting in a non-representational style, instead using abstraction in the "ideas of painting." He further diverged from his colleagues in the rigidity of his figures, a characteristic that Anita Ventura described as "[painting] not for expression so much as comprehension."
June Felter, was an American painter and illustrator from the Bay Area. Her paintings are in museum collections including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Oakland Museum of California, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, National Gallery of Art, and the Berkeley Art Museum.
Susan Landauer (1958–2020) was an American art historian, author, and curator of modern and contemporary art based in California. She worked for three decades, both independently and as chief curator of the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) and co-founder of the San Francisco Center for the Book. Landauer was known for championing movements and idioms of California art, overlooked artists of the past, women artists, and artists of color. She organized exhibitions that gained national attention; among the best known are: "The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism", "Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement", and retrospectives of Elmer Bischoff, Roy De Forest, and Franklin Williams. Her work was recognized with awards and grants from the International Association of Art Critics, National Endowment for the Arts and Henry Luce Foundation, among others. Critics, including Roberta Smith and Christopher Knight, praised her scholarship on San Francisco Abstract Expressionism, De Forest, Richard Diebenkorn, and Bernice Bing, among others, as pioneering. In 2021, Art in America editor and curator Michael Duncan said that "no other scholar has contributed as much to the study of California art". Landauer died of lung cancer at age 62 in Oakland on December 19, 2020.
Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition. Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions.