Lundy Siegriest’s artistic dossier runs well over five single-spaced typewritten pages. The ten-year period covered by the current exhibit begins with a painting entitled West Oakland Past and Present. As the title indicates, it is full of a romantic nostalgia hung on a structure bolstered by the remnants of Cubism. From this point of departure until 1955 Siegriest explores in depth the peculiar turn Cubism took in the hands of many American artists during the 1940’s. His color, always a strong point, remained unabashedly decorative with many references to atmospheric space.

In 1955 Siegriest finished a key painting in his development wherein he broke with intense color and worked in closely adjusted browns, greys and warm blacks. This work, titled Dark Landscape, is the logical precursor to his recent relief paintings comprised of deep-hued solids such as asphalt, gypsum, and natural earth colors combined with polyvinyl glue. This landscape, with its ribbon-like contours, developed into a series where these undulating stripes became body contours depicting mummy images in horizontal positions. The mummy series climaxed a period beginning in 1949 and ending roughly in 1958. Within this period Siegriest’s painting proceeds with a fundamental logic from romantic realism rooted in landscape to an adaptation of landscape technique used to portray reclining figures. From 1959 to 1962 Siegriest coalesced the various aspects of his earlier work in order to exploit more fully what he had learned. From 1962 to the present, Siegriest has experimented with various mixed media techniques with which, to date, he has not shown the facility found in his previous work in conventional media.

—James Monte