This Figurative Expressionist lived the Bay Area for two decades before settling in Greenwich Village in 1957. He was a regular at the Cedar Bar with his AbEx friends and exhibited at several New York galleries. He even taught at MoMA but soon became a reclusive painter living what he called “a lifestyle of extreme independence to its fullest.” In 1980 he returned to San Francisco where an old Chinese philosopher called him an unstained grain of sand because he never lost his dignity in the struggle to render a vision of art.