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.