The painter died at 88 last week. I don’t talk about art a lot here but a postcard of his “Mount Fuji and Flowers” from the fancy mall stationery store lived in my high school locker and then on the walls of my first office cube. I’m forever on the lookout for an exhibition poster of his “A Bigger Grand Canyon,” and I lived for any story of him in his old age, still out there making art, like this one (from LACMA’s tribute):
During the pandemic, sequestered in his home in rural Normandy, he greeted every day by walking around his gardens, noticing the changes in nature, iPad and stylus in hand. Each day, he created something new, quickly crafting a tree about to bloom or a branch or a flower, observing how his subjects changed each day with the passage of the seasons. And he would share these images with his friends; each morning I would awake in L.A. and be greeted by an emailed iPad drawing from David, reminding me of all the beauty in the world. “Don’t worry,” he’d say with his characteristic sly wit, “they can’t cancel the spring.”
