January 31 - February 28, 2025
All throughout the gallery – glints and shadows. The sharp, shining spark of ice or gems, the nacreous luster of agates and shells below the tide, the ever-shifting depths of a cloudy sky shot through with light. This is what pulls us in, what makes us pause: these glinting, moody, always changing colors. The mystery of changing light and impossible depths.
Paintings brings together a collection of David Simpson’s celebrated Interference works from over the past 25 years. Simpson, who turned 97 this January, developed a fascination for metallic and interference acrylic paints in the late 1980’s. There are only six colors of interference paint available, each containing the characteristic micro-particles of mica coated in titanium oxide; however, due to the light reflecting and refracting qualities of the mica, these paints hold a remarkable spectrum of color potential.
Simpson was captivated by the possibilities of these mercurial paints and worked for many years developing and honing the unique techniques that allowed their changeable nature to be developed to the fullest. Using only one pigment, Simpson is able to tease out a boggling variety of shades and actions (the angles and ranges of color shifts) across his canvases. This facility with the paints required the development of a hand-crafted trowel which he designed himself, and of a layering technique which can involve applying up to thirty layers of paint.
The action and shifting of Simpson’s paintings are astounding. Once light hits the surface of a canvas, sinking into the paint – the coated particles are activated. Light bounces and reflects, back and forth within and among the particles, changing the visible color spectrum of the piece.
A work which at first reads as a deep, shaded purple blue, like Sapphire, can shift through a whole range of color, resolving into the color of an icy silvered sky.
These effects of change occur with a shift of light source, or with the physical movement of a person around the painting, viewing the light and painting from different angles. But the effects go beyond even this to include shifts in natural lighting throughout a day, and even to seasonal and regional changes in light quality and color. Perhaps unintuitively these paintings often show off their shifts even more profoundly in lower light, like twilight, where they can even seem to glow like embers with an internal fire.
The pieces in Paintings exemplify a whole range of experiences of these magical shifts. May Day seems to contain every hue, blue through purples and pinks, but then shifts to silver in certain angles. Odd Fog can read almost dark purple at one moment but then runs into peachy gold. The roiling deep blue of Burnt Offering ripples into the gold-copper sheen of sunlight through cloud. And the icy, pale aquamarine of Pale Dragon somehow shivers into a deeper lilac-blue.
Each painting different, not just from the others, but within itself different from moment to moment. They are alive. They breathe. They react. They change. There is a sheer cliff-edge breath-taking quality to these works: beauty.
What fascinated Simpson in his decade’s long exploration of the possibilities inherent in light and paint, also snags us, as viewers. The work is an endless surprise, changeable as light, as day, as weather. And somehow the sheer beauty of that shifting, moody to ethereal, earthy to celestial, tugs at something deep within our own human forms. The breathing, everchanging mutability of life itself.
- Michaela Kahn, PhD
Sapphire, 2017, acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment), 34 x 34 inches
Burnt Offering, 2013
acrylic on canvas (interference pigment)
40 x 40 in.
DS190
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Red Steel, 2014
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
34 x 34 in.
DS595
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$25,000
$18,000
Clouded Copper, 2007
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
34 x 34 in.
DS0063
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Odd Fog, 2019
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
34 x 34 in.
DS479
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May Day, 2019
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
34 x 34 in.
DS476
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$18,000
Slo Burn, 2017
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
34 x 34 in.
DS394
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$18,000
Smith’s Copper, 1993
acrylic on canvas (iridescent pigment)
60 x 60 in.
DS594
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Wine Country, 1997
acrylic on canvas (iridescent pigment)
60 x 60 in.
CJDS002
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$18,000
Chills & Fever, 2014
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
34 x 34 in.
DS287
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$18,000
Foggy Bottom, 1997
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
6 x 6 in.
DS527
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$18,000
$50,000
$50,000
$5,000
Flash Point, 1996
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
6 x 6 in.
DS297
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Little Gold Consort, 1997
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
6 x 6 in.
DS521
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$5,000
$5,000
Dark 6, 1993
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
6 x 6 in.
DS298
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Yellow Copper 6, 1995
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
6 x 6 in.
DS531
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Mink, 2011
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
6 x 6 in.
DS518
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$5,000
Little Devil, 1995
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
10 x 10 x 2 in.
DS596
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$5,000
Sovreign # 1,2,3, 1998
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
12 x 9 x 2.375 in. each
DS471
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Sapphire, 2019
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
34 x 34 in.
DS478
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$5,000
Red 6, 1995
acrylic on canvas over board (interference pigment)
6 x 6 in.
DS529
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$5,000
Rosa Reverso, 2000
acrylic on canvas (interference pigment)
48 x 48 in.
DS576
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$6,500
$16,000
$18,000
$35,000
Born: 1928 in Pasadena, CA
Lives & works in Berkeley, CA
Education:
1958 MFA, San Francisco State College
1956 BFA, California School of Fine Arts
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2025, 24, 22, 22 Charlotte Jackson FIne Art, Santa Fe, NM
2021 Studio La Vitta, Verona, IT
2020, 18, 16, 11 Haines Gallery, San Francicso, CA
2016, 15
Geukens & De Vil COntemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium
2013 University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie, WY
2012, 07, 05 Gallery SOnja Roesch, Houston, TX
2009 Modernism Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2000 Sonoma Museum of Visual Art, Santa Rosa, CA
1990 Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, NE
1978 The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA
1967 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
1964, 63, 61 Robert Elkon Gallery, New York, NY
1960 Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA
1959 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Selected Group Exhibitions:
2014 Museo Fortuny, Venica, Italy
2010 Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
2009 Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Long Island, NY
2007, 05 Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
2005 Cicic Museum, Linden, Germany
2000 US Berkely Art Museum, Berkeley, VA
The Panza di Biumo Collection, Varese, Italy
1995 M.H. de Young Memorial Art Museum, San Francisco, CA
1986 Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, NE
1985 The Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA
1978 American Abstract Art Sincer 1945, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (traveling)
1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (traveling)
1963
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
1963 cont. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
1962 Tornio Museum of Modern Art, Italy
Fifty Calivornians, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
1955 Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
M.H. de Young Memorial Art Museum, San Francisco, CA
Selected Collections:
Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD
Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA
M.H. de Young Museum, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC
Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
La Jolla Museum of Art, La Jolla, CA
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Il
Museum of Contemporary Art (MART), Roverato, Italy
Museo di Arte Cantonale, Lugano, Switzerland
Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Trento, Italy
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA
Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY
National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC
Oakland Art Museum, Oakland, CA
Panza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland
Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza, Biumo Superiore, Varese, Italy
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ
Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY
Reed College, Portland, OR
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA
Seattle Museum of Art, Seattle, WA
Shasta College, Redding, CA
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
