Oil Painting 4 - Pier 39

A guaranteed colourful crowd scene walking along a popular pier boardwalk with an iconic San Franciscan skyline behind was enough to tempt me to this spot and work through the necessary permit process to bring the oil painting set up here.

The view down on a sunlit crowd made me think of Claude Monet's La Rue Montorgueil, and how he tackled the challenge of a moving mass of people with combinations of coloured brushstrokes.

The piano staircase on the left reacted something like a real piano, which was a real novelty for the first couple of hours.

The composition tilt has been introduced to keep the viewers attention on the flow of the crowd down the pier and reduce the impact on a potentially boring vendor roof directly below my vantage point.

Oil Painting 2 - Up on the Roof

Roof terraces have always had an appeal to me and I am sure to other cold English people living in rain dripping pitched-roof houses and watching American television.

So now it is my turn to share in the Californian sun, with our accommodation having a flat roof with access and a fascinating vista right the way around. From up here we can see cable cars, the sea, Alcatraz and the Sister Act church, as well as Lombard Street, some Steve McQueen 'Bullit' and 'The Rock' car chase scene locations and even some of Scorpio's hideouts from 'Dirty Harry'.

This painting is a morning view, I often try and start something that isn't too challenging to travel to for in the mornings, so having this lot literally upstairs was perfect. Early mornings in San Francisco are quite misty so this painting started around 9.30am until noon over 5 days. I was keen to capture some typical Victorian-style colourful architecture along with the cable car route, and the distinctive incline streets and flat intersections.

It was quite a perilous place to paint with no rail or barrier which I have tried to relate with an exaggerated pull down to the nadir vanishing point.

The harsh relatively continuous sunlight is facilitating some enjoyable experimentation with injecting strong colour into shaded regions.

Oil Painting 1 - The Crookedest Street in the World

Oil Painting1 - 'The Crookedest Street in the World'

We allowed ourselves a few days much needed R and R on arrival to get over the jet lag, see some sights and get to grips with our new surroundings before sourcing the equipment and starting work.

Our accommodation is in North Beach relatively close to this landmark - Lombard Street.

You probably already know this street it has featured in that many films, photographs and computer games. Hitchcock used it in Vertigo and it played a popular role in Grand Theft Auto.

The street used to be a straight 27% gradient drop before town planners introduced 8 hairpins to slow down the speeding Model T Fords in 1922. With the equally famous cable street cars dropping you off at the top, it's fun to walk down the hill amongst the flower beds and watch the drivers winding down the hill.

It's a difficult subject to capture despite everyone having a go with their camera. The obvious vantage point is at the bottom of the hill looking back at all 8 turns although I have attempted a different view that hopefully locates the viewer in the centre of the action rather than a postcard view from a distance.

I have tried to reflect the steepness of the hill by flipping the canvas into a portrait and condensing a 180 degree sweeping viewpoint, looking both up and down the hill from midway, into the tall format. This is a similar approach to a previous subject I painted in Shrewsbury, a steep winding road into the County town known as Wyle Cop (read more about that painting here ) -

This has given quite a 'cartoon' feel to a very cartoony landscape full of bright colours in the Californian sun, epitomised most by the resulting near vertical car near the centre of the composition.

The bright colours I am using I sourced over here, are a range of Gamblin oil colours made in the US. I decided it better to buy over here rather than ship all the equipment.

The curves in this section of the road and the curved sweep of the painting contrast the strict grid format of the rest of San Francisco seen in this painting further down Lombard Street as it heads up Telegraph Hill towards Coit Tower. The other landmark squeezed into this composition (and slightly enlarged to be noticeable) is the Trans-Atlantic Pyramid Tower.