The art scene in San Francisco in the 1970s was perhaps one of the most vibrant periods of art for the Bay Area. South of Market Street had lots of cheap spaces for living and working, the San Francisco Chronicle had an art critic named Thomas Albright who didn’t focus exclusively on celebrity artists and museum shows. Rather he gave many artists their first review and visited alternative art spaces as well as established galleries.

The San Francisco Art Institute had faculty including Angela Davis, Robert Colescott, Carlos Villa, Joan Brown, and Richard Diebenkorn. Some of the first and most important installation artists like David Ireland, Paul Kos, and Howard Fried started there. The commercial galleries gave artists their first shows even if they were still in art school and encouraged artists to work big.

I was one of the fortunate artists to be living and working in San Francisco at the time. I rented a huge studio, probably 1500 sq. ft. with tall ceilings across from the Muni bus barn. The photos below show this building in the early 2000s shortly before it was sold and demolished and one of the large works I completed there.

I had my first one person show at Project Artaud, and received a favorable review by Mr. Albright. My studio was just down the street and the work I showed was quite large. I worked in encaustic at a time it was just being reintroduced as a painting medium. I still have some of the paintings I completed at that time. Even though I went on to have representation at two different galleries in San Francisco, large paintings don’t often find a home unless purchased by a museum.

During the pandemic I took the time to go through my studio and organize things. I looked at all the work I still had and found that some work no longer worked for me and disposed of it. Others went into a stack that were reworked over the course of the two years Partners Gallery was closed.

My current project is to reduce the size of those large paintings from the 1970s and create new works from the smaller pieces. Palimpsest is my first foray into this new way of working. Palimpsest means something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.