Sam Tchakalian

Sam Tchakalian (1929-2004)

Born in Shangai, China, in 1929, Sam Tchakalian came to San Francisco at the age of eighteen. He received his B.A. in Psychology at San Francisco State College in 1952, and later his M.F.A. from the same college. He taught at California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, the College of San Mateo, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and for 35 years at the San Francisco Art Institute.

After his graduation, Tchakalian rented a large studio on Duboce Street in San Francisco where he would pursue large scale abstract painting for the rest of his life.  At the end of his life, the artist Bruce Conner called Tchakalian “one of the major lights of Bay Area Abstract Expressionist painting.”

Gerald Nordland, the former Director of SFMOMA and the Cofounder of Artforum magazine, wrote of Tchakalian’s painting that “experiencing the recent work is a sensory revelation: submerging oneself in these great fields of light and color, one feels a new awareness of life. They are joyful producers of good feelings. Working swiftly and with great physical involvement, the artist both uses his conscious mind and attempts to ignore it in his seeking for uncontrived and fresh imagery and a unity of the painting’s physical appearance.”

Tchakalian’s paintings are a dedication to a most inventive alignment of color paired with the pristine luxury of paint in its most evocative form. Nordland wrote that Tchakalian is “thoroughly committed to painting, and has come to make nature-like works with a life of their own, full of mystery, simple, sensuous and real.”

Sam Tchakalian’s paintings are in numerous collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Monterey Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum, San Francisco Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York among others. He has had solo shows at the Fresno Art Museum, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea among others.