In this beautifully illustrated biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews, Nancy Boas traces Parks resolute search for a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionisms thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence.

This generously illustrated volume is the first comprehensive publication devoted to the powerfully expressive work of David Park (1911–60). Best known as the founder of Bay Area Figurative art, Park moved from Boston to California at the age of seventeen and spent most of his adult life in and around San Francisco. In the immediate postwar years, like many avant-garde American artists, he engaged with Abstract Expressionism and painted non-objectively. In a moment of passion in 1949, he made the radical decision to abandon nearly all of his abstract canvases at the Berkeley city dump and return to the human figure, in so doing marking the beginning of the Bay Area Figurative movement. The astonishingly powerful paintings he made in the decade that followed brought together his long-held interest in classic subjects such as portraiture, domestic interiors, musicians, rowers, and bathers with lush, gestural paint handling and an extraordinary sense of color. In 1958–59 Park reached his expressive peak, reveling in the sensuous qualities of paint to create intensely physical, psychologically charged, and deeply felt canvases. This fertile period cut short by illness in 1960, Park transferred his creative energy to other mediums when he could no longer work on canvas. In the last months of his life, bedridden, he produced an extraordinary thirty-foot-long felt-tip-pen scroll and a poignant series of gouaches. Published to accompany the first major museum exhibition of Park’s work in more than thirty years, David Park: A Retrospective traces the full arc of the artist’s career, from his early social realist and cubist-inspired efforts of the 1930s to his mature figurative paintings of the 1950s and his astounding final works on paper. An overview of Park’s full body of work by Janet Bishop, SFMOMA’s Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture, will be joined by approximately ninety full-color plates of paintings and works on paper; an essay by Tara McDowell on the figure drawing sessions held by Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, and others in their studios starting in 1953; short essays on Park’s scroll, his gouaches, and the portraits that Imogen Cunningham and Park made of each other; and an illustrated chronology. Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Exhibition schedule: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: June 2–September 8, 2019 Kalamazoo Institute of Arts: December 21, 2019–March 15, 2020 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: April 11–September 7, 2020

--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.

The description for this book, The How and the Why, will be forthcoming.

A scientist helps readers reconsider the everyday phenomenon of light in profound ways, from spiritual meanings to the challenging questions put forth by great scientists and philosophers. 37 photos. Illustrations.

ORANGES FROM SPAIN is a collection of stories about of the trials of growing up in a community where tension, confusion and violence hold sway. Here, among other tales, a youthful seaside romance crosses the religious divide, a gang take turns at the wheel of a stolen car, and an exceptional student stirs the resentment of her troubled teacher. Set in Northern Ireland against the background of the troubles, these vignettes capture the spirit of adolescence in difficult times.

Strangers come together to run. Angela and Brendan are racing towards a wedding day that is increasingly tainted by doubts. Yana runs to free herself from the darkness of the past and to remember her missing brother. Cathy thinks about the secret she has been unable to share. Running takes Maurice past his daughter's house, the place he is not allowed to enter. Over the nine weeks unexpected friendships are forged, challenges faced and by the time of their final run together all will grasp a new commitment to life itself.

A heartbreaking story of tragedy and of the past catching up with a father in modern-day Northern Ireland 'One of the shrewdest observers of the way we live now' Independent 'Park is an excellent writer; psychologically astute, lyrically unflinching' Telegraph 'He writes prose of gravity and grace' Guardian Having survived a brutal childhood in the heart of Belfast, Martin has built a life that he never imagined, and always fears he does not deserve. He has a devoted wife, a son and a daughter whose academic success is launching her out of her proud father's orbit. Returning home one night to find police cars waiting, he thinks his sins have finally caught up with him, but instead the news is wholly unexpected; a senseless and devastating tragedy. And in the face of the trauma, which tears his fragile family apart, Martin finds that the violence of his past has not gone but is merely dormant; its call must be answered.

Set in a frozen winter landscape, the new novel from the prize-winning, acclaimed author David Park is a psychologically astute, expertly crafted portrait of a father 's inner life and a family in crisis I am entering the frozen land, although to which country it belongs I cannot say. The world is hushed, cloaked in snow. Transport has ground to a halt, flights cancelled and roads treacherous. Yet Tom must venture out into this transformed landscape to collect his son Luke, sick and stranded in his student lodgings. During this solitary journey from Belfast to Sunderland by car and boat, Tom reflects on his life- the beloved wife he leaves behind, labouring to create the perfect Christmas and mend their family 's cracks with seasonal cheer; the son he is driving towards, yet struggles to connect with; the countless small disappointments of his photography career; and the absence that is always there as a voice in his head his other son, Daniel. In prose both lyrical and effortless, David Park vividly presents us with the inner life of a man grappling with existence 's challenges- the memories that haunt us, the secrets that divide us, and the bonds that strengthen us. Meditating on marriage, masculinity, parenthood and ambition, this novel encapsulates, with its exquisitely nuanced, precisely delineated depiction of human experience, the unsolved mystery at the heart of our lives.