San Diego Industrial Landscape Painting

For sale

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.