Four Men
1958

This large painting, created two years before David Park’s death, depicts a beach inhabited by four male figures wearing bathing trunks. Three of the men face the viewer on the shoreline as if they were posing for a photograph, while a fourth, seated in a rowboat, moves in the opposite direction through the water. Working from memory rather than preparatory studies, Park used a thick, large brush loaded with saturated pigments to create blocks of color that oscillate between descriptive references and abstract notations. The result is that, like a memory, the scene and the personalities of the figures emerge from and dissolve back into abstraction in equal measure.