Tuesday Art ATTACK- Paul Wonner "Still Life With Indian Miniature”

Paul Wonner was born in Tuscon, Arizona on April 24th 1920. He later moved to California to study painting. He settled in the Bay Area and received his B.F.A  from California College of the Arts in 1941. Once graduated, Wonner was recruited into the Military and served until the end of WWII. After the War he returned to the Bay Area and attended the University of California Berkley receiving his M.A in 1953 all thanks to the GI bill. 

After graduate school he became a prominent figure in the second generation or "Bridge Generation" of the Bay Area Figuration School. This movement, which was headed by David Park and Richard Diebenkorn, turned away from the popular style of abstract expressionism and began to reincorporate the figure as well as the real world back into painting. 

In 1962, he was asked to teach at UCLA and moved to southern California. Towards the end of the 1960s he lost interest in the loose painterly expressions of the figure and shifted his focus to creating hyper-realistic still life. Wonner died in San Francisco on April 23, 2008. 

Drawing in the Studio (1964)