San Francisco :: People Watching on Fisherman's Wharf

People-watching. So many realities.

I did these drawings at the San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf in the midst of the July 4th festivities last summer. 

It struck me that there were two distinct worlds, and you could not perceive both at the same time, for they ran parallel, without any points of intersection. There was the world of the tourists, and there was the world of the homeless. Once I focused on one, the other became invisible, and vice versa. The haunting, the black & white, the slow-moving and the heartbreaking did not mix with the cheerful, the colorful, the giddily disoriented and hastily erratic. I made it a point to see both, by drawing it.

Thanksgiving Flowers

This series was inspired by the Louis Comfort Tiffany's stained glass, and done at the San Francisco's Botanic Garden in the summer of 2011. Hope you enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday!

San Francisco :: Japanese Tea Garden

A day's worth of playing with abstraction - shifting shapes and colors - at the beautiful Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco.

Torii Gate

Lantern

Pagoda

Ravens

San Francisco :: Sausalito : Travel Posters

 One day trip to Sausalito in July...

Rocks, Sail Boats, Mountains

Houses on a hill

Relaxing by the fountain

San Francisco :: The Golden Gate Bridge

...man, was it windy! As I walked on the bridge, it swayed and thumped under my feet. The cars and buses zoomed by within inches, and the annoyed bicyclists tried to make their way through the crowd of tourists. The wind was pounding so hard that it made me completely disoriented and somewhat deaf for the entire day that we spent at the Golden Gate Bridge. The pages of my pad kept trying to run away with the wind, and the soft pastels on paper quickly turned to flying dust. I finally hid underneath the bridge amidst wild flowers and was able to relax a little and take in the beauty of the surroundings. Here are a few of my "windy" studies of the bridge.

San Francisco :: Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma

...The play of light and shadow, the vibrancy of hues, the glitter and the twinkling...Only in Californian heat of July will you see such color...Dream a little dream.

 

San Francisco :: The Largest Chinatown Outside of Asia

The day spent drawing San Francisco's Chinatown was one of my favorite days of the whole west coast trip with Dalvero Academy.  Maybe because it felt like I was not in America at all. Nobody I encountered that day spoke or wanted to speak English. 

This particular Chinatown is the largest one outside of Asia, and the oldest in North America. First Chinese immigrants started to arrive in 1848. This Chinatown became a city within city, with it's own government, it's Old St. Mary's Church (the first Asian church in America), and land/dwelling ownership.

Every Chinatown has an entrance gate, so I went looking for one. This entrance gate was topped with fish, most likely a carp, the symbol of persistence needed to overcome obstacles. For the Chinese, the gates are symbols of barriers and crises that a person must pass during a course of life.

The Gate of Chinatown.

It was both strange and sad at the same time to see most of the Chinese people around me with the walking sticks. A lot of old people, slowly conquering narrow, steep sidewalks, a cane in one hand and a little grocery bag in the other.

Lost in the tight maze of authentic, shabby but colorful streets, my friend and I dived into a place that looked like a bakery. We sat down with our tea and pastry, looked around and realized there were only men there. Mostly old men, wearing those obsolete-looking 70's style glasses and hats of all sorts, reading Chinese newspapers and conversing on subjects mysterious to us. The napkin holders had lottery tickets in them. Every man that came into the shop had to first scratch a lottery ticket. 

Inside the bakery/lottery shop. The man who would later come up to me.

The men noticed that my friend and I were drawing them and started loudly discussing us, pointing and laughing. I have no idea what they said. One of them came over to look at my drawing of him, laughed and gesticulated at me, not being able to speak English. He completely invaded my personal space and pointed his finger right into my face, but his smile and kind eyes somehow made it okay. After all, I was the one invading his normal daily routine.

After the bakery slash lottery shop, we went looking for a Fortune Cookie Factory.  The Chinese really brought the idea of "luck" with them! 

 

Facade of the Fortune Cookie Factory.

Woman hand-wrapping fortune cookies at the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory.

The factory was a shocker:  in a small room, crammed amidst chachkas and boxes, there were  two women there, literally hand-wrapping the little fortunes into the hot yellow circles of dough they lifted off the conveyer belt, one by one. The man at the entrance shouted at the tourists "50 cent! 75 cent! 2 dollar! 5 dollar!" He priced every move: want to photograph? that's 75 cents! want to stand there? that's 50 cents! buy a bag of cookies? that's 5 dollars! I shoved a few dollar bills at him so that he'd let me and my friend draw there. He kicked us out after about 15 minutes. My payback was this portrait of him! That's exactly what he looked like, too.

Owner of the Fortune Cookie Factory.

At the end of the day, someone from our group offered me a fortune cookie and I got something good, something about my happiness shining through onto others. I should have saved that one. Do you save your fortunes?

The contrast of the skylines.

San Francisco :: The Cable Car Turnaround

After the three magical days in Seattle, we, the Dalverians, were off to San Francisco. The first drawing day was a special one: it RAINED all day long. A San Franciscan expat friend of mine said, there's a 0.1% chance of rain in July, and we got it! Apparently, according to local TV news, the rain has ruined weekend plans for many distressed interviewees. Well, it didn't stop us.

We got on the cable car at the Powell street turnaround, and were on the way to the Hyde Street Pier. It rained, allright, but that worked to our advantage, as the waiting line for the cable car was not too long.  But then...about half-way to the pier, our car came to a screeching halt because of a fallen tree on the way... Eventually we got to the destination on a shuttle bus. The day was damp and grey, and finding cover on the pier to draw was not easy. Here's a drawing of the Hyde street cable car turnaround.

We went back to the pier for the 4th of July. The pier was barely recognizable on a hot sunny day, filled with insane crowds and street performers. But that's in another post.