Irving Guyer

In the last decades of his life, he developed increasingly innovative, formally sophisticated work, combining masterful landscape and color field painting with geometric abstraction.

While this work was clearly part of the New York School, he resisted the call to adhere to a singular style in order to pursue his interest in artistic experimentation, a pursuit that lasted the rest of his life.

During this time, he continued to make his living as a commercial artist and designer, and stayed engaged with the art world by reading voluminously, experimenting in the studio, and keeping abreast of major exhibitions and movements.

For the next several years his paintings juxtaposed simplified opaque shapes in a series of dynamic abstracted Pacific Coast landscapes, which were shown in a number of venues in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Stanford University.

In 1985, after retiring from the practice of commercial art, Guyer and his wife moved to Nevada City, in the Sierra Foothills of California, where he continued to paint in a small studio.

[3] The simplified compositions of Guyer's late paintings, with their stark contrasts of light and dark, extreme close-up and distance views, texture and ground, may have been influenced by his increasing visual impairment, but also complete a trajectory discernible from his earliest works.