Latvian / American artist and playwright. Staprans was born in 1926 in Riga, Latvia. He now lives in San Francisco, California with his wife, scientist Ilona Staprāns. He has two daughters, Maretta Staprāns-Barlow and Alda Staprāns-Mednis. After living in occupied Latvia and in a Displaced Persons camp during World War II, Staprans immigrated to the United States with his family in 1947. He studied art at the University of Washington under Alexander Archipenko and Mark Tobey, then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to begin graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He studied with Hans Hofmann and Karl Kasten, among others, and graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts in 1954. Staprans began exhibiting his art in the Maxwell Galleries in San Francisco. Staprans' work is held in the permanent collections in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the LA County Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Portland Art Museum, among others. A career retrospective of his art opened at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in March, 2006, was shown at the Hackett-Freedman Gallery and traveled to Riga, Latvia, where it was exhibited in the Latvian National Museum of Art later that year. Staprans' skillfully constructed still life and landscape paintings are notable for his sensitive response to light and color. A recent review of his work exhibited in Los Angeles compared the "tasteful seriousness" of his paintings to that of Cézanne. Staprans is said to examine the "architecture" of everyday objects in his art using explosive color and flattened compositions, creating a "tension between representation and and abstraction that plays with viewers' expectations." Staprans is also an accomplished playwright. Most of his plays are set in Latvia during the 20th century. His play "The Freezing" was produced in 1979 by the San Francisco Little Theater and the Latvian National Theater in 1980. His... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raimonds_Staprans undefined

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