Every Thursday Evening: The Drawings

Every Thursday Evening: The Drawings of Frank Lobdell, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, Nathan Oliveira, Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown

When:  Fri., Nov. 21, 2008 – Sun., Feb. 1, 2009
Where:  Duncan Gallery


The Thursday night drawing sessions Frank Lobdell joined had their beginning in the early 1950s as weekly studio visits among David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn. Friends since the late 1940s, Park and Bischoff began their ongoing Thursday evening figure drawing sessions working from models shortly after Park was appointed to the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley in 1955. The sessions were first held at Bischoff’s Shattuck Avenue studio located in an old organ factory, and later, when Richard Diebenkorn returned to the Bay Area to teach at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland, group drawing sessions were also held at his studio in Oakland’s Triangle Building. At various times the three were joined by fellow artists Theophilus Brown, Nathan Oliveira, James Weeks and Paul Wonner.


Occasional sketching from a nude model at one or another of their studios evolved into a weekly routine of drawing and lively discussions about painting. David Park’s eventual withdrawal from the group because of failing health led Bischoff to invite Lobdell to take his place. All three were instructors at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). The Thursday night sessions provided them an excellent forum for moving back into the serious work of their studio practice; they were especially convenient for Bischoff and Lobdell, who had classes scheduled only on Monday and Wednesday. Lobdell’s studio was located in the old Audiffred Building that was in downtown San Francisco at the bottom of Market Street so most of the Thursday drawing sessions were held in the East Bay studios.
During 1955 and 1956, Brown shared a Shattuck Avenue studio with Wonner that was located in the building where Diebenkorn’s studio had been established. In those same years, Oliveira moved into a studio in North Oakland following his discharge from the Army and since both Brown and Oliveira were teaching classes at CSFA, they began to commute from the East Bay. Brown invited Oliveira to join the weekly drawing sessions that continued at Park’s studio and later sessions were held at both Bischoff’s and Diebenkorn’s studios and less frequently at Oliveira’s and Lobdell’s two studios. The sessions gave them mutual support and proved to be an important social time as well as occasions for ongoing dialogue.


This exhibition presents almost thirty drawings selected from these group drawing sessions representing examples of all but David Park and James Weeks work. Each artist’s style, Bischoff, Diebenkorn, Lobdell, Oliveira, Brown and Wonner, is identifiable to the discerning viewer and, sometimes, the studios in which each drawing was created can be identified by the furniture, mirrors and fabrics that act as backdrops to the model’s poses. The drawings are often spatially complex and are efforts of discovery and represent the refining of compositional problems that emerged in the artist’s paintings. These works were created while Bischoff and Diebenkorn were involved in their active engagement with Bay Area figuration, a school of which, along with David Park, they had brought to national prominence. Lobdell used the practice of drawing the figure as a way to develop a vocabulary of shape that could convey an emotional or erotic charge while Diebenkorn’s nude drawings were ones of intellectual detachment. Bischoff’s figure drawings are quiet and discretely sensual.