While recognized for his landscape painting, David was also an accomplished sculptor, portraitist, caricaturist, book illustrator, sign painter, published author, poet, teacher, writer, historian and raconteur. I lost all sense of time painting the canvasses hung on my perfect studio walls. My eyes retained the colors and images of what I was painting. I grew used to seeing my hand, the studio, the checkerboard of the hotel across Geary, the world as if made of paint.
Art was everywhere…The artists and residents were collective and singular, solo acts and members of a chorus, we were the children in the Labyrinth if not paradise, we were saltimbanques and street rebels. We achieved notoriety if not complete acceptance. We were not radical, ours was an old fight, we were certainly never chic. Others joined the original residents. Others brought others, we all learned to dance on the ancient threadbare tightrope between artistic expression and human survival, and to one degree or another, by one definition or another, by choice or not, all shotgun wed to political action.
In , driven by an insatiable appetite that knew no bounds to see and make art, David traveled to join friends in Soumensac, located in the southwest region of France.
His horizons expanded at every turn as he took his inspiration from the breathtaking views the area offered him. He returned on numerous occasions in the years that followed.
Along with being remembered for his warmth and wit by those who hosted and embraced him on those stays, he produced some of his most beautiful work while there. Much of that remains behind in homes and on gallery walls in the region. His genius invited me to explore pathways of my own. Regardless of where he lived and where his painting took him he was always, to his core, the proud descendant of settlers who first arrived in the Central Valley in the latter part of the 19th century, making him a 5th generation Californian on his maternal side, a 4th generation Californian on his paternal side.
