Sketching with the San Francisco Sketchers at the Merola Opera Program inside Yerba Bueno Gardens

A friend recommended the 'Meetup' website for activities in New York. The website looks like it could be a very useful tool for very quickly meeting some of the active local art community in foreign destinations. I joined the SF Sketchers group and requested to come along to this meeting, sketching a superb open air opera performance in Yerbs Bueno Gardens.

Oil Painting 5 - Downtown San Francisco

A major part of the excitement of this trip is having the opportunity to tackle the dramatic height that these American cities give you. I wanted to get a vantage point as high as possible and was delighted that our Lonely Planet guide book had suggested some public garden spaces on top of buildings. This space on top of a beautiful Art Deco building at 343 Sansome Street, is a wonderful sun terrace on the 15th floor. 

Office workers often bring their lunches up to the quiet garden area up here to get some air with the traffic a distant murmur below. There was one corner where the view of the financial district was clearly the most dramatic, looking down along Sansome towards Market St. 

In this view you have the drama of the height we are at, coupled with the fact that we are still being dwarfed by nearby skyscrapers. Contrasting bands of dark tinted windows with lighter concrete on tower blocks either side of the view pull your eye into the composition like a Japanese sunburst flag. I have kept the brushwork loose and expressive on these sections so your eye is quickly swept past them toward the more detailed brushwork of the street level in the centre of the painting, coupled with the device so often used to catch the eye in urban american paintings - the yellow taxi.