"To earn its name, a painting has to possess a little 'magic.'"
— Raimonds Staprans
I've been studying the work of Raimonds Staprans for years, long before I ever met him.
His paintings would appear in the high-end galleries at the art fairs where I've exhibited, and they had a very specific effect. In environments built on visual overload, where everything is competing for attention, his work didn't compete.
It held.
Quietly, completely. You didn't scan past it. You stopped.
Saturation as Control
The first thing you register is the color.
It's fully saturated, juicy, direct, and unapologetic. There's no softening, no dilution to make it easier to absorb. The hues are pushed right to their edge.
And yet, they never fall apart.
That's where the rigor is. Staprans doesn't just use color, he builds with it. He understands how one color activates another, how density can be countered, how visual weight moves across the surface. The paintings are constructed through relationships.
Up close, the surfaces reveal themselves even more. Layers of pigment create subtle shifts between fields of color, variations you feel before you consciously see them.
This is the same principle Josef Albers spent a lifetime studying: that color is never fixed, always relational, always dependent on what surrounds it. I wrote about how that thinking shapes my own work in How Josef Albers Shaped the Way I See Color. Staprans arrives at the same truth from a different direction, through observation rather than theory, but the underlying logic is identical. You can see it at work in a painting like Sail Away, where warm and cool tones push against each other across a hard geometric edge, each making the other more alive.
It's a discipline that runs parallel to what Richard Diebenkorn made so clear: color isn't decoration. It's structure.
The result is work that feels immediate, but never casual.
Within a Lineage, But Not Contained by It
Staprans spent over sixty years working in San Francisco, in dialogue with a generation of painters including Wayne Thiebaud, Diebenkorn, Theophilus Brown, and Gregory Kondos.
These artists helped define what we now call the Bay Area Figurative Movement, using everyday imagery as a framework to explore color, light, and spatial structure.
But Staprans never sat comfortably inside that category.
Where others often arrived at harmony, his work carries a subtle pressure. The objects, tables, fruit, interiors, are recognizable, but they don't settle. There's a tension that runs through them, something slightly unresolved that keeps your attention active.
He described it best himself: "I am an abstract painter whose objects are really recognizable and sometimes quite realistic."
That contradiction is the point. The imagery is a framework. What's really happening is harder to name.
Encountering the Work in Motion
Seeing this work at an art fair changes the experience.
Art fairs are fast, crowded, and transactional. People move quickly. Decisions happen on instinct.
And still, his paintings slow things down.
I've watched people lean in, pause, stay longer than they intended. The work creates its own space within the noise. That kind of presence isn't accidental. It comes from clarity. From a painting knowing exactly what it is doing.
Meeting Staprans
I had the opportunity to meet Staprans at Raimonds Staprans: Paintings at Hackett Mill Gallery, April 8 – July 1, 2011.
He was open, generous, and engaged, fully present with the people there to see the work. I brought a book with me, and he signed it. A simple moment, but one that stayed with me.
And yes, I'll say it directly: I'm a fan.
Not casually, but through sustained looking. The kind that builds over time, where the work continues to unfold rather than resolve.
The Question I Ask, and His Answer
When I meet artists I admire, I tend to ask a question that has nothing to do with career or influence:
Do you ever go back? Rework old paintings? Paint over them?
He didn't hesitate.
"Yes, I do."
There were more words around it, but that answer was the one that stayed.
Because in his work, so deliberate, so carefully constructed, you might assume finality. That once a painting reaches that level of resolution, it's fixed.
But it isn't.
For him, the work remains open. Reenterable. A painting can always be reconsidered, even undone. That lack of preciousness is part of what keeps the work alive.
It's not about protecting the image. It's about staying in relationship to it.
Why It Still Feels Urgent
Contemporary painting moves in many directions, narrative, material experimentation, digital influence.
And yet, Staprans's work doesn't feel dated.
If anything, it feels increasingly relevant.
Because it returns to something fundamental: the direct experience of color. Not as trend. Not as reference. As substance.
That kind of clarity doesn't compete with noise. It cuts through it.
What I Carry Into My Own Work
Studying Staprans has sharpened something in my own practice:
You don't need to dilute intensity to make a painting work.
You need to understand it well enough to hold it.
That idea continues to surface in my own geometric work, the tension between constraint and feeling, structure and presence. It's something I've explored in Beyond Shape: How Constraint Gives Life to Geometric Abstract Painting and in Artist Philosophy: Minimalist Landscape Art. You can see that tension directly in a piece like Ebb and Flow, a 36x48 coastal abstract where the palette is built entirely on color relationships, each tone earning its place through what surrounds it. That coastal body of work, and how the shoreline translates into geometric form, is something I explore in depth in Geometric Coastal Art: Translating Coastal Landscapes into Abstract Paintings. The same logic runs through Between Two Forms, a blue and white geometric diptych where two panels hold a conversation across a shared horizon, each form defined by what it stands beside.
Staprans embodies that balance.
And when it all comes together, structure, color, tension, there's that final, unnameable element he pointed to so simply:
Magic.
The kind that can't be forced, only allowed, and once it's there, you don't forget it.
I am writing this from memory. Staprans passed away this year. Another great artist gone, whose work will live on long after, present, saturated, and impossible to ignore. Just like the man.
In his memory, I've been returning to my own work, paintings where color and geometry hold the same kind of tension he spent a lifetime exploring. You can see some of that in my geometric mountain paintings.
This post is part of an ongoing series on artists whose work has shaped my thinking. Other posts in the series: Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn, Theophilus Brown, Curtis Fields.
