Gala 2025 Buy it Now 1: Wayne Branum

Tom Field
Fort Wayne, IN 1930–1995, San Francisco, CA
Untitled, 1986
Watercolor and pencil on paper, 18 × 24 inches
Value: $2,750
Courtesy of Denise DiSalvo

Framing courtesy of Frugal Framer

Tom Field was a Bay Area painter who attended Black Mountain College from 1953-1956,where he studied painting under Joseph Fiore. He left BMC for San Francisco when the school was forced to close due to insufficient funding. In California, Field joined the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific and worked as a merchant seaman as he continued to paint. Field was considered a member of the so-called “San Francisco Renaissance,” named to describe the local emergence of art and writing in the decades following the end of the Second World War. Local galleries exhibited his vivid and gestural paintings, very much reflective of the abstract expressionist style prevalent at BMC and on the rise in San Francisco. Field’s work was featured in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1962 and, in 2001, a posthumous retrospective was organized by the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art. His work is included in multiple public collections including the Asheville Art Museum.