David Simpson (artist)

David Simpson (born 1928) is an American abstract painter who lives and works in Berkeley, California.

David Simpson was born in Pasadena, California in 1928 to Frederick Simpson, an interior decorator and expert on 19th century fabrics and furniture and Mary Adeline White, a housewife.

After Frederick died in 1936, Mary supported Simpson and his older brother, Robert, by working at the National Tuberculosis Association.

Simpson joined the Navy in 1945, when he was seventeen-years-old.

For three years, he served as a Hospital Corpsman stationed near the Mexican border in El Centro, California.

Simpson has a stepson, Gregory Vose, born in 1949, and a daughter, Lisa Simpson, born in 1953.

After staying on an extra year to help fellow hospital staff with the repercussions of war, Simpson left the Navy in 1949.

In 1952, Simpson met art student Dolores Debus.

The two were married the following year in Sierra Madre, California.

In 1953, Simpson and Dee lived in the same house as Hedrick and his wife, the artist Jay DeFeo (best known for her ten-foot masterpiece, The Rose), on Bay Street in San Francisco.

During that time, Simpson and Dee ran the San Francisco Art Institute's cafeteria to help with Simpson's tuition fees.

During their shifts at the cafeteria, Defeo babysat the Simpson's newborn daughter, Lisa.

In 1954, Simpson co-founded the Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco alongside Wally Hedrick, a neo-expressionist painter and integral member of the Beat movement ; Deborah Remington, an abstract artist known for hard-edge painting abstraction; Jack Ryan, a poet; Hayward Ellis King, an artist who became the director of the Richmond Art Center, and Jack Spicer, a poet and faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Before it was turned into one of the inaugural student-run cooperative galleries in the area, the space had been an auto-repair shop.

Herb Caen wrote in the San Francisco Examiner on September 26, 1954 that the Six Gallery was "sponsored by six people interested in art, music, poetry, integrity and other worthwhile things."

Many well-known artists, including Joan Brown and Manuel Neri, held their first one-person shows at the Six Gallery.

On October 7, 1955, Allen Ginsberg read his famous poem, "Howl" publicly for the first time at a reading at the Six Gallery.

"Howl's" future publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet Michael McClure, and Jack Kerouac were in the audience, but Simpson, home sleeping after a night shift at his gas station job, missed the reading.

In 1956 Simpson graduated from the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) with a BFA; and in 1958 he earned an MFA, from the San Francisco State College.

Simpson used payments from the G.I. Bill to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, earning his BFA in 1956.

The Six Gallery closed in 1957.

Since 1958 Simpson has had more than 70 solo exhibitions of his paintings in galleries and museums worldwide.

His paintings have been included in hundreds of group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe.

He went on to receive his Master of Arts and Junior College Teaching Credential from San Francisco State University (then San Francisco State College) in 1958.

While in school, Simpson worked the graveyard shift at a gas station and managed the campus cafeteria to cover tuition costs.

Simpson has said that studying under professors like Clyfford Still, David Park, and Elmer Bischoff helped him realize that he, too, could make a living teaching and producing art.

In 1959, Simpson accepted a teaching position at the American River Junior College, near Sacramento, California, where he taught for two years before joining the teaching staff of Contra Costa Junior College in San Pablo, California.

During the early 1960s Simpson was included in two seminal group exhibitions: Americans 1963 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York curated by Dorothy Canning Miller and Post-Painterly Abstraction curated by Clement Greenberg in 1964; that traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto.

Simpson is an artist and teacher whose work is associated with the minimalist, monochrome, and color field movements.

"During the last several years I have been interested in paintings made up primarily of horizontal stripes and bands. Some of these appear as landscape—some as pure paintings. I've always been more interested in the painting than the landscape," –David Simpson, 1962.

From the beginning of his career Simpson has described himself as a reductive rather than minimalist painter.

His reductive, abstract landscapes of this period were inspired by the level earth floor and color-smeared sky of the Sacramento Valley.

Simpson has related these works to "Indian blankets, or East-Indian madras, or the American tradition of landscape."

In 1965.

Simpson became an assistant professor in the art department of the University of California, Berkeley.

Five years later, he was promoted to full professor with tenure.

After teaching at Berkeley for twenty-five years, Simpson retired in 1990.

Simpson has had three notable artistic periods during which he produced cohesive works of particular resonance and importance.

These phases are the Landscape-Based Abstractions, the Relational Abstractions, and the Interference Paintings.

Defeo, who worked in numerous mediums including drawing, collage, photography, jewelry, and sculpture, was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2013.