David Simpson

David Simpson (born 1928) is an American abstract painter and educator, who lives in Berkeley, California. His work is associated with the minimalist, monochrome, and color field movements. 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. 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.

Early life and education 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. In 1952, Simpson met art student Dolores Debus. The two were married the following year in Sierra Madre, California. Simpson has a stepson, Gregory Vose, born in 1949, and a daughter, Lisa Simpson, born in 1953.

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. After staying on an extra year to help fellow hospital staff with the repercussions of war, Simpson left the Navy in 1949. He went on to receive his Master of Arts from San Francisco State University (then San Francisco State College) in 1958. Many well-known artists, including Joan Brown and Manuel Neri, held their first one-person shows 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.

Connection with Jay Defeo

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.

Academic work 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. 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.

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." These meticulously envisioned paintings involve minute spatial calculations. They depict vividly colored geometric configurations in push-pull interactions of marked reverberation and intensity. Particularly notable works from this period include Red Square (1974), Barrio (1979), Quatro Camino, (1980), Five Square Rotation, (1982), and Intra Muros (1983). About Simpson's Red Square—which takes its name from Russian painter and geometric abstract art pioneer Kazimir Malevich's famous Red Square painting (1915)—Kenneth Baker wrote in 2001, "Each shape pulses with assertions of its own position and scale in the picture's internal space." In 2009, the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco held a solo show of Simpson's relational abstraction paintings.

Interference paintings (late 1980s–present)

In the late 1980s, Simpson began experimenting with interference paints, soon becoming fascinated with the mercurial characteristics of the medium. Interference paints, which have only six pigment variations containing micro-particles covered with titanium oxide, reflect and refract light, giving rise to nuances of color and optical illusions of depth. Using only one color pigment for each painting and a specially designed, hand-crafted trowel, Simpson applies on average about thirty coats of paint to each canvas, creating a modulated surface space with which the paint interacts in ripples and layers. Three paintings of particular importance during this period are April First (2012), Enthrone (2013), and Mississippi (2012). He exhibited the paintings in his 130-room villa in Varese, eventually even converting the stables into galleries for his growing collection. Dr. Panza bought his first Simpson painting in 1990. He went on to acquire over 140 of Simpson's works, mostly his earlier iridescent metallic paintings and then his later interference pigment paintings.

Critical reception

"In the 1970s, Simpson's painting would have taken its place more readily in the narrower context of color-field abstraction, a tendency more associated with New York than the Bay Area. How lucid and soulful Simpson's big paintings of the period look today. They may appear to present themselves wholly at a glance, because they conceal nothing, but it takes time to size up how any one of these pictures operates in terms of color, composition or visual poetics."—Kenneth Baker. IBM Corporation, San Jose, California John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Illinois Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California Panza Collection, Varese, Italy; Lugano, Switzerland Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona Reed College, Portland, Oregon San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington Shasta College, Redding, California University of California, Berkeley, California University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska