Howard Hack | Fine Artist | The North Beach Years 1949 to 1953

THE NORTH BEACH YEARS | 1949 to 1953
Howard had seen the future! He saw what made a painting and knew at that moment that he would be an artist, a painter. More than anything he wanted to get to San Francisco and become part of the growing art community...and North Beach was it!

I was sitting on a park bench looking at Lake Merritt, I was 17 and it was the time of year they call Indian Summer, lots of atmosphere, also called aerial perspective. What happened I could describe later in words, it was an intuitive flash, an epiphany. What I was looking at is what they make paintings of, if I see "that" then I was of "those", an artist! I had found myself, and the rest is history.

Next question for me was, "How do you make a painting?" Art schools had become a contest to see who was furthest "out there", but to paint what I was seeing required craft and technique in the academic or classical sense. I needed to study with someone with the training and skills of the Old Masters. That person was Martin Baer. He and his brother had studied painting in the 1890s, the Flemish method of making a realist painting, a method no longer being taught in art schools - rather it was action, expression, the subconscious; all great, but this "new concept" needed to be found and integrated into mainstream realist painting.

Yes, revolution and concept were running around North Beach in the form of the Beatniks. There was also an older generation of Bohemians who had "been there" - the 1900s, Paris, the 20s. Martin Baer was one of them, and part of my studies with him was absorbing the stories of that time - "the who" of that generation: Hemingway, Chagall, Bonard, Stein, Duncan. Baer left Paris in 1939. I studied with him from 1949 to 1953: The North Beach Years.
- Howard Hack, 2012

PLAY SLIDESHOW