Biography

Lives and works in Berkeley, California.

David Simpson’s luminous, ethereal canvases represent a distillation of painting to its essence. Emptied of all imagery and pictorial concerns, his paintings are about process, the material possibilities of the medium, and the subjective nature of perception. During the course of his career, Simpson gradually eliminated composition, narrative, and other devices from his work. Rather than reining in his creative impulses, he has instead discovered great freedom in this process of purification; it is almost as if he has adopted an optical form of haiku poetry, limiting himself to the visual equivalent of 17 syllables. After fifty years of painting increasingly reductive abstractions, Simpson has proven himself capable of consistently discovering new directions and new possibilities within his carefully circumscribed, highly refined work.

Born in Pasadena, California, Simpson became interested in art before entering college. He took classes at Pasadena City College and thrived under the influence of his instructor Leonard Edmondson, who favored imagery influenced by indigenous cultures. Simpson’s studies were temporarily curtailed when he served in the United States Naval Hospital Corps in the 1940s. In 1949, he moved to the Bay Area and enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts. Simpson completed two years of classes before leaving school to live in Mexico for a year, later returning to Southern California, and marrying. By 1955 he regained the impetus to return to his studies, and completed his B.F.A. at CSFA in 1956. He transferred to San Francisco State, and earned his M.F.A. in 1958. He took a teaching position at the American River Junior College. Says Simpson, “It was 1958 when the first paintings using horizontal banded areas, strata, and color washes of paint were done. The flat country around Sacramento partially influenced me, I think. These first paintings were landscape based.”1 He began exhibiting his oil paintings regularly and two years later returned to the Bay Area to live in Richmond and teach at Contra Costa College in San Pablo. In 1963, Simpson was represented in Dorothy Miller’s Americans 1963 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the final in a series of groundbreaking exhibitions surveying cutting-edge contemporary art. The next year he met the New York-based critic Clement Greenberg, who subsequently included Simpson’s work in Post-Painterly Abstraction, an exhibition that he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Around 1965, Simpson began painting with acrylics and polymers that afforded him more profound color saturation, and simultaneously started to phase out landscape allusions, creating interest with wavering stripes in varied tones. Over the course of the next twenty years, Simpson progressively simplified his work, eliminating superfluous forms until, in the 1980s, he finally arrived at the monochromatic abstraction using special pigments. As an educator, he influenced an entire generation of artists interested in reductive abstraction at U.C. Berkeley, where he taught in the department of art practice for twenty years before taking an early retirement to focus exclusively on his painting. In the past decade, Simpson’s work has been shown as widely in Europe as in the United States where his supporters include Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, one of the foremost collectors of contemporary art in the world.

Quick Shift Green, Gold Shift, March Blue, and Radical Red are about light in its various manifestations. This series of paintings dating from 1996 provides a spectacular introduction to the phenomenology of perception evidenced by Simpson’s mature work. Simpson painted the series using an acrylic-based paint that contains ionized pigment particles—specifically, titanium oxide electronically coated with particles of mica. This causes the surfaces of the paintings to refract light, a quality that is enhanced by his meticulously applied layers of paint, laid down in more than thirty thin layers. The mica particles react to the ambient light as well as the viewer’s perspective, shifting like weather patterns, causing each viewer’s perception of the piece to be slightly different. For all their austerity, Quick Shift Green, Gold Shift, March Blue, and Radical Red are quietly glamorous because of their soft shimmer, as well as being elusive, difficult to quantify, and ultimately subjective.

Throughout his entire career, Simpson has maintained his unwavering focus on developing a body of work that is nonpictorial and nonobjective. The philosophical intentions behind Simpson’s paintings suggest an allegiance to the principles espoused by the earliest abstract artists—Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian—rather than the painters and sculptors working in the 1960s and beyond associated with minimalism. In fact, Kandinsky and Mondrian viewed abstraction as the final step in a process of reducing painting to its essential forms. Simpson concurs with this comparison, explaining, “I am not a minimalist; if anything I am an essentialist. Art for me is belief made visible. It is always apparent to me when an artist has nothing to believe in. A lot of artists hold up the mirror to life to reveal its insanity or meanness. I don’t see that my art has to do that. Instead of providing a mirror for life, I hope my work provides a meaning to live, a kind of utopia.”2 —J.N.


1. John Humphrey, David Simpson 1957–1967, exh. cat. (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1967), 4.
2. Charlotte Moser, “David Simpson: Holding onto pure abstraction in the face of Bay Area figuration,” Artweek, 8 March 1990, 15.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

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