Richard Fiscus

Richard Fiscus, a Bay Area painter who taught humanities and served as dean of students at the San Francisco Art Institute for 40 years, died Thursday of heart failure at Kaiser Hospital in San Rafael. He was 79.

A much-loved figure at the Art Institute, where he taught English and other non-art courses and chaired the humanities department, Mr. Fiscus was a self-taught artist who took up the brush in the 1960s, creating a personal style of landscape painting and printmaking noted for its bold color and fluid, simplified forms.

Mr. Fiscus' work was widely exhibited around the Bay Area and beyond and found its way into public, corporate and private art collections. San Francisco's Fine Arts Museums has a set of Mr. Fiscus' 1976 print series "Golden Gate Suite," which includes images of Fort Point, Lands End and Baker Beach. Other works are owned by the Brooklyn Museum, Bank of America and Paramount Pictures. His work appeared in the 1972 Woody Allen film "Play It Again, Sam," which was shot in San Francisco.

Mr. Fiscus "never runs out of vital new things to say about the familiar Bay Area landscape," the late Chronicle art critic Tom Albright wrote in 1968, reviewing a show at the Reese Palley Gallery, and "has developed his style into a new, intriguingly precarious balance between naturalism and out-and-out abstraction. ... Fiscus' paintings are first of all brilliantly decorative, charged with intense colors and vibrant with surface and movement."

Born in Stockton, Mr. Fiscus grew up in San Anselmo and took the train to Tamalpais High School. After serving as a cryptographer in the Navy, he attended the College of Marin and then UC Berkeley, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1949. He did graduate work in education at Cal and got his master's degree from Ohio State University.

Mr. Fiscus taught elementary school in Stockton and Richmond in the early 1950s, and lectured on the need for arts education. In 1954, he was guest instructor in arts education at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. In 1955, the Art Institute, then called the California School of Fine Arts, hired Mr. Fiscus to teach "Problems of Teaching Art." Over the next 40 years, he served in many capacities there, including dean of students and chairman of interdepartmental studies. He retired in 1995.