David Park was born in Boston, Mass., and studied at The Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1928. He later moved to the San Francisco Bay area. Park taught at both the California School of Fine Arts from 1944-52 and at the University of California at Berkeley from 1955-60.

Starting as a figure painter in the 1930s and `40s, he experimented with Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, influenced by Clifford Still and Mark Rothko. He then turned back, however, to the human form, now realized through a more assertive expressionist style. It was at this time in the Bay area that Park first became associated with the school of realist expressionists (other exponents of which are Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff).

Nude with Flowers contains many of the common elements of his work from the late 1950s. These paintings often involve single figures in groups or groups usually set within a unified color space, and painted in heavy impasto outlined in bold black contours. The figures are frequently organized in atmospheric contrasts of light and shadow, the faces are blank masks with black blobs for eyes, nose, and mouth. In his later works the color is bold and brilliant, and the figures rendered loosely with violent immediacy in a few big strokes of the brush. Of all the California figure painters, Park comes the closest to evoking the earlier tradition of German Expressionism.