Alan Post

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This 90-something-year-old painter and retired economist gracefully proves the power of both right- and left-brain thinking.

There’s no retirement for an artist; it’s your way of living, so there’s no end to it. —Henry Moore, sculptor

The marvel of Alan Post is not that he’s still painting at 91, but that he’s just 91. Not only has he effectively managed to cram two lifetimes into the space of one, but he just keeps on cramming—as if old age, if ignored long enough, will simply peel off like weathered, cracked paint, exposing a timeless, vibrant energy.

“Parallel” is the word most often used to describe Post’s lives. (No one who knows him is in the habit of referring to his life in the singular.) There is Alan Post the artist, who sold his first painting during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and whose expressionistic landscapes, human figures and still-life scenes have been turning collectors into addicts ever since.

“He is extremely popular and very collectible,” says Shirley Dubnick, director of the Solomon Dubnick Gallery in Sacramento, which represents Post and his wife, Helen, a sculptor. “He’s still painting like a youngster; in fact, he gets better as he gets older. Not only better, but much brighter and more colorful.”

The other persona is Alan Post the economist, wielder of significant power and influence during his 27 years as the state’s chief legislative analyst and a founding director of the Public Policy Institute of California. In 2000, the California Journal listed Post, along with Govs. Reagan, Johnson, Warren, and Brown Sr. and Jr., as one of the Golden State’s 30 most influential public figures of the 20th century. Well into his 70s and 80s, Post served on several boards and commissions, and he still belongs to the Senate Advisory Commission on Cost Control in State Government, “which,” he observes wryly, “we haven’t done very well at.”

Visiting Post at his Arden Oaks home, which he and Helen designed and had built in the late 1940s, I am struck by several things at once. First, the home itself: a treasure trove of art books and artwork (is that a Picasso ceramic I see mounted on the wall?) from all around the world, including several paintings by Post himself and sculptures by Helen, 90, whom Post describes as “a better artist than I am—so perceptive, imaginative and smart.” Clearly, these are people for whom art is as essential as air and more essential than everything else except their love for each other.

Helen is known to be her husband’s greatest admirer and most discerning critic, and vice versa.
“We respect each other’s opinions,” Post says.

He leans forward to regard a photo of his wife, circa 1970, posing next to “Hydro-Kinetic III,” her water-powered ferrous cement and bronze sculpture at the Teichert building, headquarters of Teichert Construction and Teichert Materials—one of California’s oldest and most established companies—in Sacramento.

His breath catches. “God, isn’t she beautiful?”

Helen might say the same about him. Spare and elegant, with arresting Matisse-blue eyes, Post is stature, intelligence, grace and humility personified. He considers thoughtfully each question posed to him, mining his impeccable memory to answer in careful detail. As we discuss Post’s two worlds, I begin to believe that they aren’t parallel at all; that it’s really not a dichotomy of right-brain artist vs. left-brain numbers cruncher, but that somehow it’s all intertwined.

Consider his paintings, mostly oils and acrylics that borrow heavily from his travels abroad. He and Helen bought a house (with built-in studios, naturally) on the Mediterranean coast of Spain in 1965 and have traveled extensively throughout Europe, the Middle East, Mexico, South America and the Far East. In Europe, Post has spent countless hours with his sketchbook, capturing the visage of a French fireman here, a town in the Pyrenees there.