We lived our lives on Harrison Street in Oakland from 1955 to 1959, but in the first of those years I imagined another place.  The travel books gave me the Italy and Spain of the early 19th c., and I painted those places from those books.  But there was also another place I would live,  long ago and far away in a city by the sea--and from that place I made these landscapes of my imagination.

Few of the paintings have survived.  Among the lost are a tall canvas of a broken statue high on a column by the shore (the twin to the surviving Tall Pyramid by the Sea). Another large, wide canvas had the image of a shattered bas relief of the head of medusa half buried in the sand seen from a very low viewpoint with strong foreshortening to the surf beyond.

Among the ruined survivors are a few small cardboard panels, each with a blue-red sunset sky now blotched with mold .  The sea is always a pthalo/turquoise blue and the surf a white line between the blue and a raw sienna sand.  One surviving painting shows the columns from a fallen temple and their shadows as dark purple silhouettes against the sunlight; another panel has a half-carved rock/half-ruined house partly submerged in the sand.

There were paintings now lost of a fruit-filled tree by the sea while others showed a fountain there and some paintings showed both tree and fountain together.  The place was the Mediterranean coast, North Africa or the eastern Mediterranean.  The buildings of the city were mosques with domes and towers, and the shore was near with always a few sails bright against the blue water.

One painting had it all, the Mosque by the Sea in the Oakland Museum Collection (#8 below).  Screened by the ruined arcade from a classical temple long gone, the mosque with domes and towers has a garden with a tall obelisk-pyramid, the tree (here with shadow), and the fountain (an image of most importance to me then... click here and here for two more versions), and the white sail on the sunset sea (here, there were two).  I don't think I worked with this place and its image again.  This painting had said it all for the paradise land I had sought in refuge from the dark world in the dirty pink room at the top of the Harrison Street house.

The Harrison Street house had a cupola with an open balcony, a look-out where far beyond the city you could see the Golden Gate and the towers of  the bridge.  One afternoon early in our time there, endless streams of cirrus swept for hours across the sky.  I had a lot of scraps from mats;  I went up into the cupola and painted view after view of the clouds, each view pinned at the bottom with the top of a sail.

It was the sign of my life journey.
Only one of the paintings survives.

8. Mosque by the Sea.
Oil on canvas, approx... 23 x 36 in.
Collection Oakland Museum of California

There is another survivor of the land so long ago and far away...
a still life, the fruit from the tree of life in a compote
--the bowl of the fountain--
by the sunset sea that is the sea of forever.
It was the sign that our lives could be blessed.

9. Compote with fruit by the sea.
Oil on canvas, approx.
Collection Fredricka Martin and Jeff Gornbein.

And one more painting from those days,
this one painted like I had done the clouds
on a scrap of old mat board. It is not the view to the sea
but to the mountain, the souvenir of a Sunday drive
with our children among the hills of home.

10.  After a Sunday Drive.
Oil on panel, approx. 4 x 9 in.

Most of my life has been a war between my lusts of the flesh and my deep and absolute promise to the bonds of love.  Break those bonds and the world is destroyed--and all the while, the bonds of love must be stronger and stronger to withstand the throbbing power of the lusts streaming in my veins.  The paradise land of the paintings above was in salvation from the dark world of lust embodied in the dirty pink room at the top of the Harrison Street House.  Click image below  to read about that world.

Or, click the image below for drawings and paintings
of the rotted parts of old San Francisco as the surrogates
for what I felt were the rotted parts of my soul

Return to directory of all 1950's paintings.