The Sunset
1994
Mixed media on canvas
26" x 20"
66cm x 50.8cm
Intent
A painting of the actual backyard view in the Sunset District of San Francisco where all the OG oil paintings were made — the vantage point itself, not an invented scene. Painted from underneath a bedroom that jutted out from the house, which offered shelter from the rain.
Direct inspiration
The literal view available from the painting spot — the backyard, seen from underneath the bedroom overhang that sheltered the artist while working.
Making
An early breakthrough in the series — the brushwork loosened for what the artist identifies as the first time, particularly visible in the gestural sky and the slashing verticals on the porch posts. The color, however, stayed intentionally embellished rather than freed — familiarity with the real scene gave permission to loosen the hand, not to loosen the truth of what was depicted.
Context of making
Painted under the overhang of a bedroom that extended out from the house, used as shelter from rain. This backyard was the working site for the entire OG Oil Paintings series, 1994–1996. A shed now stands in the same spot as the current studio.
Where it went
Wasn't approached as documentary record-keeping, but the familiarity of the scene allowed a freedom in brushwork that the artist hadn't let himself use before — an unlock that happened early in the 1994 work and, by the artist's account, precedes and informs the looser handling visible across the rest of the series.
In the practice
The only painting in the OG Oil Paintings series that depicts the actual vantage point the series was painted from — every other work in the series looks outward from this spot at invented or composed scenes; this one turns around and paints the site itself. Positioned early in the 1994 sequence.
What this isn't
Despite close familiarity with the real backyard, the artist did not aim for a faithful, literal rendering — color was deliberately pushed and embellished beyond what was actually there.
In the series
Functions as the origin-site record for the OG Oil Paintings series (1994–1996) — the only work depicting where the series was physically made. The early loosening of brushwork identified here is a candidate technical hinge point for the series, though it did not develop into sustained looseness; the same freedom resurfaced only intermittently afterward (notably in later palette-knife experimentation) before combining with precise, established technique in the 2022 A Colorful History piece Berlin 1911-2011 ("glitch style").
J.M.W. Turner — Artist cites a longstanding preference for expansive, dramatic skies in the tradition of Turner and Constable, independent of and predating engagement with Goethe's color theory. John Constable — Artist cites a longstanding preference for expansive, dramatic skies in the tradition of Turner and Constable, independent of and predating engagement with Goethe's color theory.
J.M.W. Turner · J.M.W. Turner
Artist cites a longstanding preference for expansive, dramatic skies in the tradition of Turner and Constable, independent of and predating engagement with Goethe's color theory.
John Constable · John Constable
Compositing method — separately observed sky studies assembled into a finished landscape, structurally close to this work's transfer-first/paint-reactive process.
Visual Similarity
Works with similar visual structure, found by comparing image embeddings across the archive.
Related Patterns
Throughlines and bio events that include this work — the same connections shown on those pages, linked back here.
Vision Analysis
The composition is viewed from beneath a covered porch or overhang, looking out into a backyard. Two vertical wooden posts, painted in hot red-orange with a band of yellow-gold catching direct light, frame the left third of the image and anchor the foreground; a dark, loosely brushed roofline or beam cuts across the top edge, confirming the vantage point is sheltered rather than open. Beyond this framing structure, an expansive, turbulent sky dominates the upper two-thirds of the canvas — sweeping, calligraphic strokes of white, cream, and pale blue describe a large cloud formation in motion, handled with more gestural freedom than the architecture below it. Below the sky, a dense, cluttered urban backyard unfolds: rows of San Francisco rooflines and building facades in salmon-pink stucco, a distinctive flat-fronted turquoise/teal building holding the eye at center, and a smaller reddish structure with a scalloped or arched roofline lower in the frame. Foliage — rendered in yellow-green and darker saturated green, with real textural variety between trees — crowds the lower half of the composition and partially obscures the built environment, giving the scene a lived-in, overgrown density rather than an open vista. The palette runs hot in the foreground structure (reds, oranges, yellows in the posts and roofline) against a cooler sky (blues, whites, creams) and pockets of saturated green in the trees, with the pink and teal buildings acting as secondary color notes in the middle distance. Brushwork is not uniform across the canvas: the sky and the posts show the loosest, most gestural handling, with visible directional strokes and some scumbling; the buildings are treated with somewhat more contained, blockier strokes; the foliage sits between the two registers, loose but built up in layered daubs. What resists confident reading in this photographic reproduction: fine surface detail is difficult to assess given the condition and lighting of the source photo, and the exact boundary between painted shadow and photographic artifact (visible spots/marks on the surface) is ambiguous in places, particularly in the lower-left foreground.
View all analyses →