Paul Wonner

(1920 - 2008)

After being discharged from the Army, Paul Wonner moved to New York to practice art. Soon thereafter he returned to California, enrolling in the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950. There he studied with David Park and met his future life partner, fellow painter William Theophilius Brown. Both artists quickly became immersed in the Bay Area’s Post-War art scene, encouraged by Park and Richard Diebenkorn, who invited them to attend group drawing sessions at his Berkeley studio. Wonner, together with Brown, Nathan Oliveira, Manuel Neri and other contemporaries, formed a slightly younger “bridge generation” of Bay Area figurative artists who sought a more direct, intuitive and expressive approach to painting from observation. These artists were less conflicted about abstraction versus representation than their slightly older contemporaries.