Baker Beach . 1935
2016
Mixed media on canvas
30" x 30"
76.2cm x 76.2cm
Status & ownership
Private collection
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Exhibition history
- · Heron Arts, San Francisco
About the work
Two fishermen cast lines at Baker Beach as the Golden Gate Bridge rises unfinished behind them, San Francisco, 2016. Baker Beach . 1935 sits at the height of the San Francisco chapter of A Colorful History — the point at which the artist's acrylic photo-transfer and painted-field technique had reached a natural, resolved fluency, made just before the deliberate deconstruction of process that would define the Berlin years. The source photograph, likely from the Underwood Archives (Getty Images) and dated circa 1936 though found by the artist through online research, shows two fishermen at Baker Beach with the Golden Gate Bridge under construction behind them — towers standing, deck not yet strung across. The bridge held personal significance well before this painting: visible from the artist's childhood home at 22nd Avenue and Fulton in San Francisco, it was always a private icon of the city rather than a found or arbitrary subject. The painting sold after being shown at ArtSpan Selections 2017 — purchased by skateboarder and musician Tommy Guerrero after he contacted the artist directly on Instagram. Sold at a deep discount of $300, the sale helped fund the artist's first scouting trip to Berlin ahead of the eventual move.
Intent
Painted at the point where the classical photo-transfer-plus-painted-field technique was reaching a natural, fluent finish — the last body of work made before the deliberate deconstruction of process that began after the move to Berlin. The bridge, visible from the artist's childhood home at 22nd Avenue and Fulton in San Francisco, functions as a personal icon rather than a found subject; the fishermen were included for the contrast between an ordinary, unhurried ritual and a landmark feat of engineering being born in the background — a moment of daily life the artist says he never once witnessed happening in his own life.
Making
Made in the backyard studio in San Francisco. No specific making details recalled beyond the technique feeling increasingly natural and flowing at this point in the series.
Context of making
A square canvas holding two registers at once — a black-and-white photo-transfer of two fishermen at Baker Beach, set inside a fully saturated, flat-painted color field. Sky in pale blue, ocean in layered turquoise-to-deep-blue bands, sand in warm taupe, and a deliberately cheerful green hill on the right balancing the composition against the industrial grey of the Golden Gate Bridge, shown mid-construction with its towers up and deck not yet strung across.
In the series
Continuation of the San Francisco-era A Colorful History historical-photo paintings, made at the point where the classical fully-painted technique was 'finding its own way' — distinct from the deconstructed, sometimes deliberately unfinished approach adopted later in Berlin.
Visual Similarity
Works with similar visual structure, found by comparing image embeddings across the archive.
Vision Analysis
The composition splits cleanly into three horizontal registers: a large, flat pale-blue sky occupying the upper half; a middle band of dark, silhouetted coastal hills and a distant bridge structure; and a lower foreground of layered ocean and sand rendered in flat, unmodulated color. The palette is saturated and confident — deep teal and turquoise banding in the water, a warm taupe-grey sand, and a notably bright, almost cheerful green hill on the right that sits in deliberate tension with the otherwise cool, industrial tones of the bridge and hillside silhouette. The bridge itself is depicted mid-construction: two towers stand with cabling strung between them, but no roadway deck spans the gap, and support structures are visible in the water near the base of the near tower. Two small figures stand at the shoreline on the right, rendered in muted grayscale tones distinct from the surrounding full-color field — one crouched, one standing, both oriented toward the water with what appears to be fishing gear. This grayscale treatment of the figures, set inside an otherwise saturated color field, is the clearest visual cue of two coexisting time registers within a single frame: a photographic, documentary layer describing the human presence and the specific historical moment, set inside a flat, illustrative, present-tense color field describing the landscape around it. The horizon line is high and confidently held, giving the sky significant weight relative to the incident of the composition, which is concentrated in the lower right quadrant. Brushwork and surface quality are not legible at this resolution — the image reads as flat, hard-edged color throughout, with no visible texture or painterly variation, though this may be an artifact of image compression rather than the actual painted surface. The precise relationship between the grayscale figures and the color field beneath them — whether the transfer sits on top of painted color or the color is worked around a masked transfer area — resists confident description from the image alone.
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