Painters from Los Angeles

Harry Bowden (1907–1965) was an abstract painter who lived and worked both in New York and California. He showed in both group and solo exhibitions in Manhattan and San Francisco and was a founding member of American Abstract Artists. He is known both for fully abstract and for representative works, but the latter predominate. He once said a painter should embrace many ideas, symbols, forms, tones, and colors and through metamorphosis make them into a new thing — a painting having a life of its own. Having taken up photography as a mid-career hobby, he became as well known for his photographs as for his easel works.

Ethel Fisher (née Blankfield; 1923–2017) was an American painter whose career spanned more than seven decades in New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. Her work ranges across abstraction and representational genres including large-scale portraiture, architectural "portraits," landscape and still-life, and is unified by a sustained formal emphasis on color and space. After studying at the Art Students League in the 1940s, Fisher found success as an abstract artist in Florida in the late 1950s, and began exhibiting her work nationally and in Havana, Cuba. Her formative work of this period embraced the history of art, architecture and anthropology; she referred to it as "abstract impressionist" to distinguish her approach to form and color from that of Abstract Expressionism.
Fisher is best known for her portraits of fellow artists from the 1960s, and for grid-like, architectural paintings of the facades of urban cast-iron buildings, from the 1970s. Her figurative work employs color fields and architectural details as abstract shapes to create tension between her subjects and their surroundings and impart psychological depth. Her later, carefully rendered interiors and still lifes often include reproductions of works by well-known artists.Fisher's work was written about in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, ARTnews and Artweek, and belongs to the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Crocker Art Museum, among others. She died in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles in 2017, at age 94.

John Wesley (November 25, 1928 – February 10, 2022) was an American painter, known for idiosyncratic figurative works of eros and humor, rendered in a precise, hard-edged, deadpan style. Wesley's art largely remained true to artistic premises that he established in the 1960s: a comic-strip style of flat shapes, delicate black outline, a limited matte palette of saturated colors, and elegant, pared-down compositions. His characteristic subjects included cavorting nymphs, nudes, infants and animals, pastoral and historical scenes, and 1950s comic strip characters in humorously blasphemous, ambiguous scenarios of forbidden desire, rage or despair.Early on, art critics categorized Wesley as a Pop artist, due to his appropriation of the visual language and, at times, iconography of popular culture. Later critics, however, regarded him as an art outsider whose work eluded categorization, noting among other things, his psychological plumbing of a (largely male) American unconscious, formal affinities with abstraction, and wide-ranging art-historical borrowings. Artforum's Jenifer Borum described Wesley's work as combining "a Pop vocabulary, a refined Minimal sensibility, and a surrealistic proclivity for uncanny juxtapositions," while Dave Hickey likened him to an eighteenth-century Rococo "fabulist," citing his penchant for erotic narrative.Wesley's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Portikus (Frankfurt), and the Chinati Foundation, among others. It belongs to public art collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museum. In 1976, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Francisco Alonzo "Frank" Martínez (August 9, 1924 – August 17, 2013) was an American artist. He painted murals of his Mexican American heritage.

Lari George Pittman (born 1952 in Glendale, California) is a Colombian-American contemporary artist and painter. Pittman is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Painting and Drawing at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.

Donald Jess Bachardy (born May 18, 1934) is an American portrait artist. He resides in Santa Monica, California. Bachardy was the partner of Christopher Isherwood for over 30 years.

Erika Ranee Cosby (born April 8, 1965) is an American painter. She is the daughter of philanthropist Camille Cosby and comedian Bill Cosby.