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Urban Sights: Urban History and Visual Culture

Twentieth and Arkansas Case Study

This page compares works Bechtle made using the same source photograph at this site. By using the slider bar (underneath each image) to adjust the opacity of the layers, one can see how the artist transforms a single photograph through variations in medium, color palette, tonal range, and cropping.

The page also includes artworks superimposed on present-day photographs of the site. These juxtapositions provide additional visual context for the surrounding neighborhood, and occasionally reveal instances (such as the roofline in the upper right of the Potrero Garage works) where the locale has either undergone architectural changes or has been altered in the photograph-to-painting process.

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Intersections and Repetitions 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 Bay Area Figurative painters Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and Elmer Bischoff. 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, 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.