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Peter Shoemaker

  •  Birds (1988)
  •  44″ x 42″
  •  Oil on canvas

Peter Shoemaker was born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1920 but spent his childhood in Paris, France. In Paris, he regularly visited museums, and was taken by the range of works that were on display at the Louvre. This early experience inspired a lifelong interest in art. As a teenager he moved to California, where he attended Berkeley High School and later enrolled in the University of California. After studying political science at UC Berkeley for three years, he was drafted into the army with the start of World War II. When he returned to the Bay Area at the end of the war, he enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute).

Between 1947 and 1950, Shoemaker studied at SFAI with Clyfford Still, Elmer Bischoff, David Parks, and English painter William Hayter, who was a guest lecturer at the school. His ties to the Bay Area Figurative artists in particular proved to be formative, as he became part of a tightknit circle of artists and writers in the East Bay. Yet Shoemaker’s early work was largely shaped by Hayter’s surrealist and abstract expressionist painting techniques and his teaching of automatist calligraphy. In the young artist’s works, these markings cut across large swaths of color while his later paintings draw from organic forms found in nature. Over the course of his long career, he exhibited extensively in museums and biennials throughout California, including the Oakland Museum of California, SF MoMA, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and was invited to participate in the Biennial of Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1955. In addition to his artistic practice, Shoemaker taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts from 1960 to 1984. He died in 1998.

Shoemaker’s works are housed in the Oakland Museum of California, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the National Museum and Art Gallery, Trinidad, among other public collections.

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