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 6 - The Zoetrope Cafe

Our main walk into town from North Beach (because it was the only route that didn't involve steep inclines) was along buzzing Columbus St, cutting diagonally through the grid structure of San Francisco. Columbus is lined with mainly Italian businesses, cafes, delis and restaurants that spill out onto the pavements. The walk down leads you towards the very impressive and iconic Trans-American Pyramid building looming over the city like one of the ministries in George Orwell's 1984. Big brother also seems to be present here as a siren like a WW2 air raid warning goes off every Tuesday at noon and has done ever since 9/11 followed by a very muffled illegible tanoy message that should say it is a test.

As we are approaching the Trans-America Pyramid another architectural gem pops up on the right of Columbus - The Zoetrope Cafe. A beautiful building with an exciting history. It was in this building that Zoetrope Films was formed, and the editing for classic films such as Apocolypse Now and The Godfather took place here. Francis Ford Coppola now owns the building, he keeps an apartment on the top floor, there are still film editing suites and offices on the middle floors and Coppola's Zoetrope Cafe now runs at street level selling wines from Coppola's vineyard in the Nappa Valley.

Again I made use of the shelter of the large street furniture to sneak in the easel on the busy street and gain a viewpoint that compared the two buildings. I have brought in some dark canopies and lampposts to carve into the sky and help achieve a sense of urban claustrophobia. I talked to a lot of passers by with this piece and felt I had at last scratched the glossy surface of the general American public, with one meeting in particular, with a William Bates, a African American who during a 2 hour intense conversation on the street corner relayed the tensions and frustrations of being a black male in this country. Tensions that had bubbled right to the forefront with the 'not guilty' judgement of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. 2 major protests had happened outside Federal buildings, because of this case, whilst we were in San Francisco. William also informed me of the local poets meetings; San Francisco and North Beach in particular has a rich history of activist poets with Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, the Beat Museum and the City Lights Bookshop on Columbus, and the culture continues today. From William's recommendation we went to a evening poetry reading at a bookshop in Fort Mason. The below sketch is of a utterly brilliant San Franciscan poet of Columbian descent reading at the podium. Thoughts of these regular meet ups to vent frustrations through an art form are refreshing and exciting, which I would like to see more of in the UK.

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.

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 3 - Chinatown, San Francisco

Probably the busiest pavements in San Francisco, Grant Street, is never quiet through Chinatown with 24hr bustle.The deliberately 'over the top' oriental architecture, the masses of lanterns, signage and packed street level shops culminate in an intense jigsaw of colour that would translate well into oils.

There seems to be a lot of large street furniture in the US that can be useful to a street painter to tuck in-between and keep the hazardous easel legs, turpentine and oil paint out of the crowds.

I seemed to attract a large number of older generation Chinese men to really intensely study my painting process and spoke with a few fellow painters despite a language barrier. I think there must be an enormous appreciation of craft in this demographic.

The composition i have chosen isn't 'neck-craningly' wide, instead wanting to have the majority of the picture plane filled with Grant St.'s cacophony of colour. Just as you need dark around light to know that it is light, I have brought into the frame quite a plain, spacious sunlit wall on the right as a breather, that highlights the depth and attack on the senses of the main street.

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.