David Park (1911–1960) was born in Boston and moved to California at age 17. He briefly attended the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. He taught at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) beginning in 1944 and later at the University of California, Berkeley. During the 1940s, Park embraced Abstract Expressionism, but around 1949 he famously discarded many of his abstract canvases at the Berkeley city dump and returned to painting recognizable subjects. Rather than abandoning abstraction entirely, Park applied its expressive brushwork, bold color and emphasis on the physical qualities of paint to figures, musicians, bathers and scenes of everyday life. His example encouraged friends and fellow painters Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff to pursue similar explorations, helping establish Bay Area Figurative painting as an important alternative to the prevailing abstraction of the period. Park continued painting until shortly before his death in 1960 at age 49.