Dolby Chadwick Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by the abstract painter John DiPaolo. On view from Thursday, February 4th, through Saturday, February 27th 2016. DiPaolo is a San Francisco artist known for his lush surfaces and intense, color-charged canvases. His newest work explodes off the canvas, creating a world that pulls the viewer in to examine the complex physical surface of the painting, to look deeply into the interaction of color and form, to confront the profound energy and emotion barely contained on the canvas.

Working in his studio at Hunter’s Point Shipyard, DiPaolo works on several large canvases at once, moving them around the studio as the current one demands attention. When a painting stops working, it gets banished to the storeroom for a week or two and when it returns to the studio, it starts working – or disappears under new layers of inspiration.

“Sometimes even the ones I love in the very beginning end up getting covered over, but with something that is even better,” DiPaolo says. “So I say to myself, ‘You’ve got to surrender. All you are is some in-between force that’s making this thing happen.’ It’s not about doing it so forcibly. It’s about getting the organic-ness of the material and of my experience with that to come out.”

John DiPaolo studied at the San Francisco Art Institute after moving to San Francisco in 1971 from his native Brooklyn. Northern California artists like David Park and Elmer Bischoff were abandoning pure abstraction in favor of figuration by the 1960s. But DiPaolo, influenced by teachers and artists Sam Tchakalian, Julius Hatovsky and Jack Jefferson, left behind the pop art of his 20s and explored abstraction and materiality.

Nearly 45 years later, DiPaolo’s paintings have an energy and vibrancy that continue to challenge and surprise the viewer.