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David Simpson has lived, taught and shown in the Bay Area since the mid '50s and has influenced a whole generation
of artists interested in a reductive ideology. For the past 20 years Simpson has been working with an interference
pigment, an acrylic based paint containing ionized particles, that when applied in many layers, refract the
light. The resulting paintings have highly active surfaces that appear to change color as one moves around
them, or as the natural light shifts through out the day.
Simpson has been exhibited in Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, France, and extensively in the States.
He is represented in major collections such as Collection de Panza di Biumo, Italy, the Museo Cantonale D'Arte,
Switzerland, San Jose Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
| Born in 1928 in Pasadena. He lives and works in Berkeley.
Simpson has explored varieties of abstraction since the early 1950s, enjoying acknowledgement and
success in the art world. In 1963 he was chosen by New York's Museum of Modern Art curator, Dorothy
Miller, to appear in what turned out to be the last in her legendary series of group shows of contemporary
American art. (Reinhardt was another painter included.) And in 1964 he appeared in Clement Greenberg's
famous exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At that time Simpson
painted landscape-derived abstractions and, in the 70s, he practiced a reductive but relational mode
of abstraction. But with his discovery of a new acrylic medium in 1987, he was able to embrace finally
and successfully the monochrome's radicality
Simpson uses an acrylic paint with interference properties. The paint is composed of titanium dioxide
electronically coated with mica particles. Simpson tends to mix complementaries, but admits that orange
and blue also work together well. He also mixes black acrylic with the interference pigments, finding
that a little bit of black helps the colour jump out. Interference pigments cause optical effects that
are comparable to iridescence. When you look at the painting from one angle, you receive one set of
colour sensations. When you shift your position, you get another. As you move back and forth in front
of the canvas - and the paintings make you want to do so - the experience changes. The change of light
also dramatically affects the optical experience, and the play of light across the canvas surface is
subtly kinetic.
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