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This show of paintings and drawings by former
San Francisco artist Channing Peake (1910-1989) includes work from the 1930s
to the 1980s, representing
50 years of the artist’s career. Alexander Fried,
Art Editor of the San Francisco Examiner, wrote in a 1959 article: “He
[Peake] has moved now
to San Francisco, painting with new fury in a North Beach studio
once frequented by Stackpole,
Matisse and Rivera. Art is flowering everywhere, says Peake, but
the Renaissance will be here.
‘Paris and New York have had their day. San Francisco is next.’ ”
Peake received a scholarship in 1928 to the California College
of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He
finished two years there, then spent two years at the Santa Barbara
School of Fine Arts. As a
young man he traveled to Mexico where he worked with Diego Rivera
on frescoes at the
National Palace in Mexico City. He enrolled at the Art Students
League in New York City in
1936. He studied there with Rico Lebrun and assisted him from 1936-1938
on a WPA mural for
Pennsylvania Station. He returned to the Santa Barbara area in
1939.
Known as a colorist, he experimented with a variety of painting
techniques
that he infused with a
special sense of the intricate relationship between color and form.
Nature was his inspiration:
plants and animals, rocks, bones and leaves, clouds and tide-pools
were some of his subjects.
Even in paintings of man-made objects, such as a series of farm
implements, the resulting works
have a biomorphic feel. Peake had an exhibition at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art in
1950 and San Francisco’s M.H. de Young Museum in 1957.
Channing Peake’s life and work embodied a personal, poetic
spirit and we are pleased to present
this exhibition.
View
Biography
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