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1. 1 2013-06-25T17:33:45-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2 1. Painting the Bay Area Bridget Gilman 6 plain 2013-06-29T13:06:29-07:00 Bridget Gilman 032da9b6b9003c284100547a1d63b1ed9aca49e2

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• 1 2013-06-25T16:59:01-07:00 Spatial Fluidities 7 plain 2013-06-29T13:05:55-07:00 Bechtle has devoted several decades to representing the residential neighborhoods of the San Francisco Bay Area. Depicting ordinary, everyday activities and spaces, his work interfuses the concreteness of local images with the broad, complex issues of contemporary socio-spatial relationships. Almost all of Bechtle's paintings depict his home turf: one can chart the artist's movements through the Bay Area by tracking his oeuvre. Early paintings in Alameda are of Bechtle's hometown; canvases from the 1970s frequently picture Oakland and Berkeley, where he worked and lived during these years; in the 1980s the artist moved to San Francisco and subsequently began painting its streets and neighborhoods in earnest. Collectively, the works include environments classified as both urban and suburban–whether picturing the city of San Francisco or its smaller East Bay neighbors, Bechtle's paintings concentrate on the intersections of private and public spaces equally in these variously dense locales. The works share also subject matter: cars, streets, and residential architecture are the supreme constants in Bechtle's output. His depictions of the Bay Area are highly attentive to the particularities of specific places, but also offer a continuum from city to suburb, reminding the viewer of the fluidity of living and social spaces. While public thinking has often focused on the postwar disparities between urban and suburban life, Bechtle presents them as overlapping environments, showing viewers the purely residential in the city or architectural density in the suburbs. Though there are distinctions between the San Francisco and East Bay paintings–pavement and hills dominate the former's topography, in a manner very specific to the city's famous geography–the implied interdependence between city and suburb is particularly significant in light of shifting American demographics. In much of the West central cities no longer serve as hubs, making dispersion the norm. In other places gentrification has revivified urban centers, but with tourism and leisure taking the place of former industrial economies. Bechtle's fluid spaces are important indicators of the complex, multiform rearrangements of old 'core' and 'periphery' models.
   Bechtle's San Francisco images almost always depict areas of the city that are residential rather than commercial or landmark-centered. Cars, the artists first and most famous subject, still appear in most every artwork, though the compositions are often expanded laterally, making the vehicles an element of the larger landscape rather than portrait-like focal points. Foregoing downtowns or other hubs of urban commerce and tourist destinations, the artist tends to spaces strikingly akin to those he painted in the East Bay: quiet neighborhoods filled with row houses and mostly empty streets. San Francisco's hilly terrain shifts the depicted topography, but the way Bechtle addresses these vertiginous inclines is consistent with his overarching disinclination toward the overtly dramatic in favor of the subtle spatiality of the everyday. As French sociologist Henri Lefebvre argues, this everyday–i.e. that which lies outside specialized activities and encapsulates both the 'little, chance events' and the 'infinitely complex social event'–is a product of modern urbanization, the era in which society's existence becomes ordered and repetitive, and thus generates quantifiable routines and a visible everyday. However, for both Lefebvre and Bechtle, the urban everyday is not limited to traditional city cores; just as America witnessed a postwar explosion of ex-urban development, France likewise wrestled with appropriate architectural models for new industries and a rapidly growing population in peripheral locations–spatial expansions Lefebvre was highly attentive to. Likewise, in Bechtle's paintings the quality of continuity is paramount, signifying not only the existence of mass-produced housing within an urban center, but the ways in which twentieth-century development increasingly blurred the lines of demographic categories and dislodged old visual landscape paradigms.  
• 1 2013-06-25T17:33:45-07:00 1. Painting the Bay Area 6 plain 2013-06-29T13:06:29-07:00 Bechtle has devoted several decades to representing the residential neighborhoods of the San Francisco Bay Area. Depicting ordinary, everyday activities and spaces, his work interfuses the concreteness of local images with the broad, complex issues of contemporary socio-spatial relationships. Almost all of Bechtle's paintings depict his home turf: one can chart the artist's movements through the Bay Area by tracking his oeuvre. Early paintings in Alameda are of Bechtle's hometown; canvases from the 1970s frequently picture Oakland and Berkeley, where he worked and lived during these years; in the 1980s the artist moved to San Francisco and subsequently began painting its streets and neighborhoods in earnest. Collectively, the works include environments classified as both urban and suburban–whether picturing the city of San Francisco or its smaller East Bay neighbors, Bechtle's paintings concentrate on the intersections of private and public spaces equally in these variously dense locales.