Paul Wonner was born in Tucson, Arizona and trained as an artist at the California College of the Arts and at UC Berkeley in the 1940s and ‘50s. He emerged as an artist in the late 1950s at the same time as David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. Wonner is identified with the Bay Area Figurative group, which is considered an alternative to the abstract expressionism of the New York School.
Wonner’s work dramatically changed after he moved to Southern California, and then back to the Bay Area in the 1960s and ‘70s. At first his pictures were softly defined human figures, later he developed his more well known stylized still lifes, which are bright, flat, and light, in which the uncanny distances seem to separate even objects that are in close proximity.

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