Don Clausen, 1974 California Bay Area Abstract Expressionist Bold Oil Painting Don Clausen, 1974

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Don Clausen American (b. 1930)
Untitled (1974)
Oil on board
Hand signed lower left and verso
Framed 11.25 X 13.5 … Read more Don Clausen American (b. 1930)
Untitled (1974)
Oil on board
Hand signed lower left and verso
Framed 11.25 X 13.5 sight 9 x 11.25 inches


Don Clausen is an American Postwar & Contemporary painter who was born in 1930. Don Clausen is a graduate of California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California. He lives and works in the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area. He mainly works in oils on canvas, but sometimes does sculptures and assemblages. In his luminous abstractions, Clausen employs every color of the rainbow, the strong lines forming geometric shapes that appear to fly through space. Nothing is weighed down in his paintings; it’s as if images came to him from outer space or other realms. He turns the physical world into dabs and streaks of color that convey an engulfing sense of motion.
Whether abstract expressionism or representational, his works convey enormous energy and vitality, like masterpieces by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. They also are distinctive for their sculptural quality, a result of his thickly layering the paint and then slicing down to the canvas with a palette knife or section of a venetian blind; his choice of tools is as eclectic as his subject matter. His son is the well regarded sculptor Eric Clausen, a master blacksmith who does sculpture in iron. An active part of the Bay Area arts scene, Don Clausen was contemporaries and consociates of people such as Geraldine Duncann, Donald Namohala Yuen,Jade Fon, Betty Pleshe, Frank Porpet, and Will Summers. He showed his work for twenty years at Zantman Gallery in Carmel. Don Clausen exhibited extensively in California and on the East Coast. See less