This June, the Crocker Art Museum will open a vibrant exhibition of works by Raimonds Staprans, a Latvian-born painter of landscapes, architectural elements, and still lifes with ties to California’s Bay Area figurative movement and pop art. With more than 55 paintings on view, Full Spectrum: Paintings by Raimonds Staprans will afford many opportunities to appreciate Staprans’ bold color and richly layered technique.

Born and raised in Riga, Latvia, Staprans created art at a young age, and was encouraged by his parents to develop his drawing skills in the hope that they might prove useful to a career in medicine. When Russia advanced on his homeland during World War II, his family fled. In Germany, Staprans entered the Esslingen Art School, and in 1947, he immigrated to the United States. A graduate of the University of Washington in Seattle, he studied with painter Georges Le Brun and the visiting sculptor Alexander Archipenko.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in art and drama, Staprans moved to Berkeley to pursue graduate studies. There, he studied with professors who were focused on abstraction, though often with lingering references to the natural world. At first, Staprans deemed viscous pigment an expression of true force in painting, but his interest in impasto diminished as his aesthetic concerns evolved. Over time, he, like many of his Northern California peers, began to eliminate, reduce, and define, with Staprans honing his compositions to their essentials as much, if not more than the rest of his colleagues. For him, painting became a subtractive process as much as an additive one, and he generalized his subject matter for maximum compositional effect.

“Staprans’ paintings are really abstractions of light and color that retain a basis in the visual world,” says Scott A. Shields, Associate Director and Chief Curator at the Crocker. The subject matter is deceptively simple, and yet the paintings themselves are highly complex. One never tires of looking at them, as there is always more to discover.”

Today, having called Northern California home for more than six decades, nearly his entire career, Staprans identifies his paintings as purely Californian, though in terms of his education, experience, and personality, he remains thoroughly Latvian. Many of his paintings highlight California landscape and architecture, with a basis both in reality and the artist’s imagination. Assertive brushwork and traces of revision are ever present. In his landscapes, which are devoid of people, taut contours and bold hues define fields, marinas, isolated trees, and architecture, while scorching sunlight descends from skies of the deepest blue. His still lifes of fruit, artist materials, and chairs share this same quality of light and rich color, often through a full prismatic spectrum.

Says Shields, “The exhibition is so titled not only for the beauty of light and color in the paintings themselves, but for the fact that it represents some sixty years of the artist’s achievements.”

Full Spectrum: Paintings by Raimonds Staprans will be on view at the Crocker Art Museum from June 25 – October 8, 2017.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive, full-color catalogue with essays by Paul J. Karlstrom, art historian and former West Coast regional director of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art; David Pagel, art critic for the Los Angeles Times and chair of the Art Department at Claremont Graduate University; Nancy Princenthal, writer and art critic; Ed Schad, associate curator at The Broad, Los Angeles; John Yau, art critic and poet; and Scott A. Shields, associate director and chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum.