Footnotes

Provenance
Greystone Galleries, Cambria, California.
The Collection of Jack and Ione Lollar.
Private collection, Shafter, California.

Exhibited
Laguna Beach, Laguna Beach Art Museum, Dream and Perspective: The American Scene in Southern California, 1930-1945, August 23 - November 3, 1991.

Painted shortly after the inception of the US government's WPA program, East 5th (Street) is a time capsule of life in New York during this time period after the Great Depression. Men are lounging in a rundown hotel lobby as a man is getting a shave and haircut in the local barber shop next door. This painting shows off the extraordinary talents of Phil Paradise in those early years after training at Chouinard art school in Los Angeles. He travelled to the East Coast in the 1930s, painting in various locales and selling paintings through galleries in New York. He was most likely influenced by time spent in South Carolina, where he was exposed to some of the artists that made up the burgeoning Charleston Renaissance. As with many of the American scene painters, Paradise's style changed through the years, becoming more stylized in his later work, but these rare early examples give us a wonderful snapshot into everyday urban and rural life in a bygone era.