Raimond Staprans, born in Latvia in 1926, immigrated to the United States in 1947. He studied art at the University of Washington under Alexander Archipenko and Mark Tobey before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area to study at the University of California, Berkeley. Hisprofessors, Hans Hofmann and Karl Karsten, proved influential to the young artist’s working methods which helped Staprans become an iconic figure in the Bay Area painting movement.