Theophilius Brown had grown up in an intellectual environment and gone to Yale where he continued to travel in cultural circles.

But when he got to his graduate studio program at Berkeley, everything changed. He almost immediately was in thrall to David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn and was able to sketch with them. And he met the man who was to become his life partner and painting partner: Paul Wonner.

He also went to Europe and was influenced by the Italians like de Chirico and a sense of mystery and allegory began to pervade his work. He painted moons and stars and symbols. Brown joined Wonner in Davis after a year. Both of the artists suggest pre cursors to Eric Fischl with his randy backyards and seasides, per Caroline Jones.

Brown, like Wonner, took figuration a step further and this painting, The Swing, from 1966, still I believe in the collection of the Mardesich Family, loads a dynamism and narrative previously unseen in the more studied, posed works of Gen 1 of Bay Area Figurative.

In The Swing, instead of two men, this is a man pushing a woman, somewhat mysteriously, in the air. It's only after a moment you notice her hanging onto the filament of rope. We are still seaside. The picture plane is bisected at a diagonal cutting across the expanse of blue sky and sand. It is so new and different that it seems almost revolutionary. The man almost looks like a satyr. The woman is bound by rope, even if tenuously. What if she lets go? It's erotic. It's free. It contains movement. And a little thrill.

Alas, very few of Brown's paintings from this period survive.

The couple ended up in Santa Monica and became close with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, the famous Canyon gay couple, among other luminaries, but Brown ended up back in San Francisco. He died in 2012 at 92. When he fact checked his Wikipedia entry, he found his designation as an AbEx painter, 'horseshit". I love that!

In 1957, curator Paul Mills of the then Oakland Art Gallery (now the Oakland Museum), was determined to gather the Bay Area Artists and help put his institution on the map. He conceived the idea of an exhibition of figurative painting around the three pivotal artists, David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn. Park and Bischoff weren't against the show but resisted being termed a 'movement'.

But Deibenkorn remembered being livid. He hated being labeled a 'school". "I hit the ceiling and was irrational. I wasn't going to cooperate." Eventually however, after much to and fro about who might be included, the artists agreed.

This painting of Elmer Bischoff's Two Figures at the Seashore also from 1957 (and also now at the Orange County Museum) was part of the exhibition. Landscape had just begun to play a more important role for Bischoff than Park. He also was, according to artist Joan Brown, 'incapable of keeping his heart [out]" of his work. There is something of a confrontation in this brilliant hued seaside. We want to know what is passing between the two figures Bischoff had been deeply influenced by Edvard Munch and was at the time going through strong personal challenges. The work shares some of the red in Park's Bather with the Knee up (see yesterday's post).

The three painters were constantly in and out of each other's studios. There was something very deep between them.