Paintings by Raimonds Staprans

  • Five oranges sit on a grey flat surface which is outlined in red. There are curved lines around each orange, hinting that they are translucent in motion. The top-most orange sits on the border with the top half disappearing under a layer of ivory paint, leaving only the outlines.

    Raimonds Staprans
    Four Windswept Oversize Oranges, 2000
    Oil on canvas
    44 × 48 inches
    The Glass Family Collection

  • A painting of a bird’s eye view landscape with abstract forms of rectangular shapes, as well as colors of blue, green, and yellow.

    Raimonds Staprans
    Road to Redondo Shores, 2010
    Oil on canvas
    48 × 36 inches
    From the Collection of Carol and Gerry Parker

  • Four yellow pears arranged in a line in the corner—three upright and one in the middle on its side—casting indigo and violet shadows on a flat ledge. The scene is lit by a warm, pale yellow background featuring a bright yellow horizon with a sun.

    Raimonds Staprans
    Sunshine Pears, 2006
    Oil on canvas
    43 ¼ × 49 ¾ inches
    The Buck Collection through the University of California, Irvine

  • A painting of 2 grey Gesso primer cans on a grey floor next to a black void that fills the upper half of the painting. The can on the left is filled with grey primer with its handle down. The other can is filled with black primer with an upright handle.

    Raimonds Staprans
    The Two Gesso Cans, 1999
    Oil on canvas
    63 × 51 inches
    Collection of the San Jose Museum of Art
    Gift of the Artist

  • Raimonds Staprans
    An Almost Empty Cherry Crate with a Red Stripe, 2005
    Oil on canvas
    44 × 50 inches
    Collection of Anthony O. Brown, Chicago, Illinois

  • Raimonds Staprans
    Afternoon 5, 1986
    Acrylic on canvas
    43 7/8 × 48 1/8 inches
    Promised Gift to the Crocker Art Museum from the Collection of Jane Olaug Kristiansen and Patricia O'Grady

  • Photo by Gary Sexton

Many of Raimonds Staprans’s paintings showcase the landscape and architecture of California as rooted equally in reality and in the artist’s imagination. Taut contours and bold hues define fields, marinas, lone trees, and architecture—all devoid of people—while scorching sunlight descends from skies of the deepest blue. His still lifes of fruit, artist’s materials, and chairs share a quality of light and rich color—sometimes a full prismatic spectrum—that imbue them with a pervasive loneliness. The assertive brushwork and traces of revision present in all his work remind the viewer that his chief reality is paint on canvas, his subjects formal elements in his process.

A resident of San Francisco, Staprans has called Northern California home for nearly his entire artistic career, more than sixty years. He describes his paintings as “purely Californian.” They each carry his signature palette of saturated blues, oranges, greens, and yellows. They are exercises in color, light, geometry, and perception. His depth of experience in the Golden State has resulted in work in sync with contemporaries in the San Francisco Bay Area such as Richard Diebenkorn, Gregory Kondos, and Wayne Thiebaud.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive, full-color catalogue with essays by Paul J. Karlstrom, art historian and former West Coast regional director of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art; David Pagel, art critic for the Los Angeles Times and chair of the Art Department at Claremont Graduate University, California; Nancy Princenthal, writer and art critic; Ed Schad, associate curator at The Broad, Los Angeles; John Yau, art critic and poet; and Scott A. Shields, associate director and chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California.

Full Spectrum: Paintings by Raimonds Staprans was organized by the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California. SJMA's presentation is organized by Jessica Yee, curatorial associate.

Raimonds Staprans shares a "daydream" about his approach to art.

Press

Raimonds Staprans' Artistic Restraint, Metro Silicon Valley (Metroactive)
February 21, 2018 San Jose Museum of Art welcomes rare Raimonds Staprans exhibit, StoryStudio (SFGate)
February 23, 2018

Sponsors

  • Myra Reinhard Family Foundation
  • Deedee and Burton McMurtry