Eileen David Shows At LewAllen Galleries

LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Eileen David, the San Francisco painter known for her colorful hillside cityscapes, street scenes, and paintings of swimmers. David’s works evoke the buoyant sensations, rhythms, and colors of her city, from images of residential neighborhoods to deserted street scenes to moments of quiet solitude found by figures swimming in the bay. Many of her works hone in on the surprising plays of light and shadow across pavement or water, providing a counterpoint to the deliberate geometries of architecture. In all cases, David culls from the multiplicity of shapes and colors found in the landscape, often amending her scenes with succulent, heightened color that lends them a dreamlike or storybook quality. The exhibition, entitled City Rhythms, opens on Friday, April 8 and continues through May 14. With a painting studio located at an old naval shipyard on San Francisco Bay, David is immersed in the multifaceted, underlying geometries and patterns characteristic to the life in a city that she loves—as well as its idiosyncrasies. “As I look out, you’re not just looking across, you’re looking up,” David says. As a result, her images concentrate the eye of the viewer on the vibrantly colorful built environment of the San Francisco hillsides, festooned with winding tiers of foliage and architecture that bend and twist like the rows of a chorus-line. Also included in this exhibition are images of David’s paintings of swimmers in the San Francisco Bay. In these works, the human figure appears as an image of active force exerting itself against its surroundings, all the while the water refracts the body, turning the parts of the body underwater into abstract fragments of color. These fascinating images were inspired by David’s own experience swimming in the Bay, which is reflected in the way the images express a near-somatic experience of water and transcendent moments of solitude.  “I have a feeling of well-being when I swim,” David says. “It’s thrilling—it’s a wilderness experience in the city.” Born in New York City, Eileen David studied at SUNY in New York City, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, and earned her Bachelor of Arts degree at San Francisco State University and a Master of Fine Arts at San Jose State University. Over her career, David has been awarded with various honors including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a Catherine Urban Scholarship.