Paul Thiebaud Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Eileen David: City and Sea on Saturday, November 9, 2024, from 3-5pm, with an artist talk at 3:30pm.  On view will be fourteen paintings from David’s new series focused on views of the Pacific Ocean along San Francisco’s western coastline.  Alongside these works, the exhibition also features twelve recent paintings depicting David’s signature “housescapes” and views of the urban architecture of San Francisco and its bay side waterfront.  Full of visual rhythm and tension, the works in the exhibition reveal David’s love of capturing light in paint through her ongoing visual dialogue with the city she calls home.  The exhibition will be on view through January 11, 2025.

A longtime resident of San Francisco, Eileen David made the city her primary subject and muse shortly after she arrived.  In her newest body of work, David has turned her gaze outwards to the waters along Ocean Beach and Land’s End.  In these dynamic paintings waves ripple across the ocean’s surface and crash into rocks, sand, and grassy dunes.  Each capturing a different time of day, the cresting swells and foaming eddies in David’s canvases variously reflect the soft light of foggy mornings, the bright mid-day sun, and the receding amber sunsets residents of San Francisco are familiar with.  This series of work will be showcased in the gallery’s ground floor exhibition space. 

Accompanying the “oceanscapes” in the exhibition are a series of views of the waterfront infrastructure along the San Francisco Bay shoreline, including the Gatehouse of the Third Street bridge, the Hyde Street Pier, and boats docked along the Marina, which will be featured in the Upstairs Front Gallery.  Interwoven among them in the same gallery will be selection of David’s signature “housescapes” showing the neighborhoods and skyline of San Francisco from different vantage points.  In these compositions, David reduces the observational details of these urban settings to be more abstract than reality and paints the buildings, trees, and streets in vivid hues to create a visual flow as the eye travels across the painting’s surface.  Long fascinated by the architecture of San Francisco and how it fits into its geography, Eileen David’s paintings are an ongoing record of her everyday experience of living in the city and swimming in its waters.

Born in Manhattan and raised in Yonkers, New York, Eileen David studied art at the Academy of Art College, San Francisco State University (BA, 2001), and at San Jose State University (MFA, 2005).  The same year, Eileen David received the 2005 Joan Mitchell Foundation M.F.A. Grant.  Since 2006, she has been teaching art at Skyline College in San Bruno, California. Eileen David’s works have been exhibited across the United States and can be found in numerous corporate and private collections.  City and Sea is Eileen David’s seventh exhibition with Paul Thiebaud Gallery, where she has been a represented artist since 2006.