James Weeks; Painter Known for Landscapes

James Weeks, one of 10 San Francisco modern artists in the 1950s and 1960s whose work is grouped in the Bay Area Figurative Art school, has died at the age of 75.

Weeks, known for his abstract landscapes of California, died Jan. 3 in Boston, San Francisco officials said this week.

In Southern California, he exhibited in such venues as the Landau and Louver galleries in Los Angeles and the TLK Gallery in Costa Mesa. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Corcoran Museum in Washington.

“With an intensity and directness rarely found in contemporary American painting, Weeks creates his own world in which the consideration of the reality of painting is superbly merged with a concern for the mood, the drama and the uniqueness of the subject matter,” former Times art editor Henry Seldis wrote of a Weeks exhibit at the Landau in 1967.

Born in Oakland, Weeks attended the California School of Fine Arts, interrupting his studies to serve in the Army Air Corps during World War II.

He later taught at his alma mater, at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and in the late 1960s at UCLA. He taught at Boston University from 1970 until his retirement in 1987.

Survivors include his wife, Lynn Williams Weeks, also a painter; three children, Rebecca Yarowsky, Ellen Weeks and Benjamin Weeks; and a brother and three sisters in California, Jack Weeks of El Cerrito, Peggy Austin and Nancy Griffin of Santa Rosa, and Sally McCorgary of Mission Viejo.

The family has requested that any memorial contributions be made to the Collage New Music, P.O. Box 289, State House Station, Boston, MA 02133.