(b Boston, MA, March 17, 1911; d Berkeley, CA, Sept 20, 1960). American painter. Park studied at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, in 1928, before moving to San Francisco, where he took a job as a stonecutter. He married in 1930 and from 1931 to 1936 taught in private schools in the East Bay area and at the University of California Extension Division, while painting murals for the Works Progress Administration. He was given his first one-man show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1935. Park’s early work was influenced by Picasso’s figurative paintings of the mid-1920s, as in Boston Common (1935; priv. col., see 1968 exh. cat.). His work became increasingly abstract and for a brief period in the late 1940s wholly non-representational as part of a shared response to Abstract Expressionism at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where he was a teacher (1943–52). Park enjoyed the immediacy, sensuousness, and texture of Abstract Expressionist painting but was wary of relying on his imagination for the forms. He returned to figuration, though working always from memory, allowing himself to focus more on colour, form, and texture than on composition....