George Lawson is a 36-year-old Floridian who lives in San Francisco and has been showing regularly there since the mid ’70s and more recently in New York and West Germany. He co-curated the three-gallery “Open Image” exhibition in San Francisco last winter, featuring recent German abstract painting–most of it consistent with his own latter-day reductivist principles. Those principles assert the importance of an individual focus on the exact properties of painting as painting, the essential practicality of which might be summarized by Whitehead’s remark to the effect that “a mood of the finite