Paul Resika

Book excerpt: The first major survey on the graceful and colorful paintings of American artist Paul Resika. This new monograph is the most comprehensive book on the work of Paul Resika (b. 1928) to date, highlighting his landscapes, portraits, and still lifes from the 1940s to the present. Resika's most important teacher was Hans Hofmann, with whom he studied on Cape Cod and in New York City in the mid-forties. Resika's subjects are drawn from nature and reflect his surroundings, which change with the seasons: in winter, he lives in New York; in summer, Cape Cod; in spring he spends time painting in the south of France and in Italy. Province-town piers, fishing boats in the harbor, figures on the beach, and French farmhouses in the countryside emanate a dreamlike serenity and make up the rich visual vocabulary for which Resika is best known. Produced in a large format with more than 220 color illustrations, this book reflects over eight decades of Resika's output, with scholarly essays that reveal his ongoing dialogue with Hofmann's sophisticated ideas about color and pictorial structure.