This is from a series of night and twilight paintings I did in Hillcrest and University Heights earlier in the year. This vacant lot once was home to a BevMo, which burned down. There’s a construction sign with an elevation drawing of a new building, so I guess something new is coming soon in this spot.
Sold, but here’s a link to other San Diego paintings in my Etsy shop.
Fog in the City- For Sale
A scene of fog out the front window.
I started this 4×4 painting last winter, but it got messed up and didn’t dry fast enough, so I did another version in purple.
The 4×4 went into a stack of unfinished work. I found it the the other day and it seemed like a fun project to finish it.
Ocean Beach Painting- San Diego – For Sale
A sunny day on the beach in Ocean Beach, San Diego, California.
North Park San Diego Painting- For sale
A house in North Park backlit at dusk.
San Diego Nocturne –For sale
This is an older plein aire nocturne from last winter, when I did several night paintings. I never got around to publishing this one because the combination of the dark colors and the shininess led to flash glare, wrong colors, and sadness. Here’s my heroic effort to finally photograph this piece.
Quonset Hut and Palm Trees Painting – Buy now
We stopped in an industrial area. I’m not sure where we were- somewhere between LA and Santa Barbara. It was a little town with a palm-lined main street. I liked the quonset hut a lot.
I went to preschool in one- a quonset hut I mean. It was on Quantico- a military base in Virginia near Washington DC.
Hillcrest Painting San Diego Plein Air – For sale
Morning light on the corner of Robinson and Park Blvd in San Diego. A short walk from my house in Hillcrest.
I like this corner because of the way the buildings pile up on the hill behind the art deco building in front. I like painting steep areas.
San Francisco’s vertigo- inducing streets are more famous- but San Diego’s got its fair share of knee-killing ascents. Painting the city on the hills is a new project of mine.
Here are a few of my favorites:
North Park from Hillcrest
Hillcrest
North Park
University Heights
North Park San Diego Painting
A corner in North Park, where a restored Deco- era movie theatre now also includes this Starbucks and a bar. This is University Ave and… Grim? 30th? Ray Street? This is a partial plein-air, partial studio piece.
Cottage in North Park, San Diego
A cottage in North Park, overhung by magnolia trees, in morning light.
And if you looked the other way that morning, you saw this:
Orange Tabby Cat Painting
The view from our 51st floor balcony at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. Another plein air piece- I didn’t touch it up and just left it rough. I like it this way.
Painting in Vegas
Leaving Vegas at the crack of dawn, laden with heavy, heavy painting stuff. Shephard Fairey mural in the parking garage of the hotel.
San Diego Urban Painting
Morning in a cloudy alley in Hillcrest. Old houses and recycling bins- two of my favorite things to paint!
San Diego Industrial Landscape Painting
An industrial building off Convoy in San Diego. This is by our favorite Korean restaurant (Grandma’s Tofu), but there’s never any parking so we park by this place. I really like the street- mid century warehouses and industrial buildings and acres of parking lots full of big trucks and delivery vans.
Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout recently published this piece about her love-hate relationship with San Diego in Newsweek. (Matthew Hall of the San Diego Union- Tribune responds here.)
I don’t want to be scathing about the essay, since I think what she’s trying to say in her graceless way is that her suburban childhood blinded her to the quiet charm of this place. And I think that’s fair enough. A lot of people probably feel that way about wherever they grew up. They want to get out of there and try someplace different. Then they eventually move back to their hometown and never stop complaining about it until they die.
I wanted to mention Armantrout’s essay because my entire body of recent work deals with the “here-ness” of San Diego.
Armantrout says San Diego has no charisma, no sense of place, has a “blankness.”
But she’s wrong about that.
Gertrude Stein was equally wrong when she said of Oakland that “there’s no there there.”
There’s a there everyplace. Every painter knows this. If you think there isn’t, the thing that’s barren is not the place you live; the thing that’s barren is your imagination.
Cottage Liquor in Hillcrest. This is where I go to buy 90% of my Lotto tickets.
This is as far as I got with the painting plein air before the sun got too fierce, around 9:30 AM. I’d already had to move the easel once (the date palm went behind the building when I did) to get under a tree… one of my first painting teachers told us, paint in the shade, and she’s absolutely right.
Georgia Street Bridge, San Diego Painting
From the southeast corner of University Ave, in Hillcrest, looking up at the retaining walls of the Georgia St bridge over the avenue. This painting was a long time coming. I started it last winter and pulled it out periodically since then, working, wiping off the paint, giving up for a while.
Most recently I made one of my feeble efforts to clean the studio and found the painting again and I thought SURELY THIS TIME I can finish.
Palm Trees in Ocean Beach- San Diego Painting
Palms lining Newport Ave in Ocean Beach, San Diego. This converted movie theatre is now a Wings.