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As I write this, California is in lockdown The photographs on the news show streets empty of people, empty of cars, long sweeps of charcoal tarmac sided by dark clumps of trees, reaching up to a sky that although nominally blue looks colourless, sunless These places could be anywhere, I think as my eyes rove over their surfaces, seeking something else behind this featurelessness, this terrifying lack of detail And as I do, my mind flits reflexively to a California that seems a world away: to San Francisco as it was when the artist Pacita Abad landed there in 1969 Except she wasn’t an artist, then – not yet Arriving from the Philippines after her involvement in anti-Marcos demonstrations made it unsafe for her to remain there any longer, Pacita Abad had been planning only a stopover in the US on her way to Madrid, where she intended to continue her law studies Instead, whatever she found in the San Francisco community at that time was enough to persuade her to stay – to persuade her, eventually, to give up her studies in immigration law and study art instead   San Francisco in the early seventies: it is tempting to imagine it, with a tinge of that nostalgia we can only feel for times and places we’ve never experienced, as a haze of psychedelic Haight-Ashbury colour, a whirl of life and a web of rich connections – all of which are descriptions that could be comfortably applied to so much of Pacita’s work Yet in her early painting classes, the story has it, Pacita was upbraided by her teachers for her ‘wild’ use of colour Why was this pineapple purple, this table red? Why was it only her who painted with this palette? It was clear enough to Pacita where the colours came from: they were colours with which she had grown up She was born in 1942, in the Philippines’ northernmost province of Batanes, where she said no-one ever wore black ‘Colour lives in my mind,’ she said; ‘I have to paint with these colours, I can’t help it’ Yet