|
No other book understands so well the nature of painting as this study of two of
San Francisco Bay Area's great landscape painters, the late Lundy Siegriest and Terry St. John. Small wonder: Pavel Machotka,
a psychologist, is himself a landscape painter. He has spent time with his two friends on the site, observing and recording
(on days when he was not painting), and also back in their living rooms, gathering material for this book.
This book is the first to understand a painter's style as an expression of a style of perceiving. Machotka establishes that
the way a painter sees the world and thinks about it sets up the range of styles within which he can choose to work. Of course,
a painter also works within his historical setting, and Machotka sets the two lives in the context of the revolution in
landscape painting launched by the Society of Six in the 1920s and the Bay Area Figurative painting in the 50s. While doing
this, he also presents a biography of each artist which is as sympathetic as it is closely observed.
|
