Kelso No. 27

Beginning in the 1950s, Lobdell was active in the Bay Area Figurative Movement, an informal association of artists centered in San Francisco whose advocates abandoned the prevailing stylistic strategies of Abstract Expressionism, and instead focused on painting and drawing the human figure, still lifes, landscapes, and urban views. Though the movement essentially rejected pure abstraction, many of its adherents freely embraced the vigor and spontaneity of action painting in the service of representational imagery. By the mid-1970s, Lobdell was again working in abstract modes of expression inspired in part by the Surrealists and the modernist paintings of Mark Rothko and William Baziotes. Lobdell’s personal style was at once somber and dramatic, ambiguous and loosely architectonic, while exploiting the formal tension of juxtaposed planes, lines, and space. He later introduced a vocabulary of abstract symbols for both expressive and conceptual objectives.