This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Urban Sights: Urban History and Visual Culture

San Francisco Neighborhoods

This page has tags:

Contents of this tag:

This page is referenced by:

Intersections and Repetitions Potrero Hill, Bechtle's own neighborhood, and the Sunset district, for many years his place of work, are the dominant settings of his San Francisco paintings. Like the artist's images of Alameda, Berkeley, and Oakland, these areas look quietly middle class. Though economic growth from the banking and technology industries over the past several decades has led to intense gentrification in the city, the Sunset's peripheral location has kept housing costs in the neighborhood somewhat lower. If Potrero Hill's appearance still retains some industrial roots, it is likely because of the adjacent area known as the 'Dogpatch,' for many years the center of San Francisco's manufacturing and shipping economies. Originally separated from the city proper by Mission Bay, the area became increasingly populous with the connective addition of the Long Bridge and the subsequent filling of the Bay. In the early twentieth century the low-lying Dogpatch became a shipping center, while residential areas spread up and west over the hill.

Bechtle has painted numerous parts of Potrero Hill's residences, though one intersection in particular, at Arkansas and Twentieth Streets, has consistently held his attention. The artist explains its appeal:

These are houses that were all built at the same time, so there is a kind of uniformity to them that I find, you know, sort of fascinating. The places I have photographed in the neighborhood tend to be places where that sort of thing exists. You know, there are lots of places in the neighborhood where the houses are all from various times and styles plopped right next to each other. And I always avoid those.

As he indicates, the regularity of this built environment encourages explorations of composition, light, color, and medium. Such formal emphasis was a formative part of Bechtle's development, particularly as embodied in the exemplar of the Bay Area Figurative painters. These local legends' integration of the figurative and the abstract provided a model for clarifying the structures of the Photorealist's information-dense source photographs. For Bechtle, Richard Diebenkorn's work was paramount. Both Diebenkorn's landscapes and more abstract 'Ocean Park' series communicate a distinct sense of surface relationships; Bechtle adapts these 'interlocking of diagonals' so that the shapes and colors of each paintings press back against the spatial recession of his photographic rendering–qualities evident in the patchwork sidewalks and variant window and garage geometries of the Twentieth and Arkansas works. There is also, as Bechtle's comments suggest, an architectural 'snapshot' effect in this locale, as the space captures a singular moment of the neighborhood's development. Eschewing San Francisco's famed Victorians or neighborhoods with eclectic conglomerations of architectural styles, the artist instead chooses blocks that exude visual and chronological uniformity–a quality with strong suburban resonance.

This consistency in turn serves as a springboard for formal experimentation. In the case of the Arkansas and Twentieth location, Bechtle has made at least twenty works depicting this corner over the course of three decades. Many of these works are re-envisionings of the same source photograph, such as the oil painting, watercolor, and charcoal works all titled Potrero Stroller–Crossing Arkansas Street (1988, 1989, 1989). As the medium shifts, so does the composition: the more intimate scale of the watercolor and drawing are echoed in a cropping of the original painting, tightening in on the pedestrian though maintaining the focal length of the source photograph. Collectively, the multiform arrangements yield a distinctly spatio-temporal effect. Just as the works' cropping implies the pedestrian?s movement and the row houses' ascent continue out of frame, the repeated re-staging of this moment is an index of routine, everyday journeys. Likewise, the red car pictured reappears in precisely the same spot in Potrero Intersection–20th and Arkansas (1990): the perspective has shifted to the left, providing something akin to a preceding film still in a camera-pan view of the neighborhood. The still-frame staging is symbiotic with the Potrero environment, its steep slopes guiding the eye out above (or below, depending on one's orientation) the current location and thus setting one's vision into motion. Bechtle's strategies of excision, repetition, and overlap generate compositions that are at once sufficient as stand-alone images but also cumulatively profound as continuous portions of a larger environment.
2. Potrero Hill Potrero Hill, Bechtle's own neighborhood, and the Sunset district, for many years his place of work, are the dominant settings of his San Francisco paintings. Like the artist's images of Alameda, Berkeley and Oakland, these areas look quietly middle class, dominated by similar mid-size family homes, cars of common vintage and make and well-maintained streets and public spaces. Automobiles are a particularly telling feature, not simply because they are ubiquitous throughout the artist's oeuvre, but because Bechtle rarely features luxury or 'show' vehicles, instead representing the station wagons and sedans of daily use. Though economic growth from the banking and technology industries over the past several decades has led to intense gentrification in the city, the Sunset's peripheral location has kept housing costs in the neighborhood somewhat lower. If Potrero Hill's appearance still retains some industrial roots, it is likely because of the adjacent area known as the 'Dogpatch', for many years the center of San Francisco's manufacturing and shipping economies. Originally separated from the city proper by Mission Bay, the area became increasingly populous with the connective addition of the Long Bridge and the subsequent filling of the Bay. In the early twentieth century the low-lying Dogpatch became a shipping center, while residential areas spread up and west over the hill.

These residential areas are Bechtle's focus. Their elevation and position within the city provides one of San Francisco's many picturesque hill-top perches, but for the artist such overt spectacle is of little interest–the panoramic tradition has been well explored by over two centuries of painters and photographers. Instead, Bechtle utilizes Potrero sites to experiment with repetition and novel perspectives, turning the viewer's attention back toward the street surfaces and ascending house façades to investigate the neighborhood's spatial nuances and architectural contiguities.