Celebrating the art of Alta Plaza

Mark Ulriksen | Dogs Only (1995)

A NEIGHBORHOOD GALLERY is celebrating a favorite local park in San Francisco with an exhibition of paintings and photographs, many offered for sale.

Alta Plaza Park, which sits at the top of Pacific Heights a block west of Fillmore Street, has drawn a variety of artists through the years to its sloping terraces — especially since the Thomas Reynolds Gallery opened nearby 25 years ago. Among the artists included in the gallery’s newest exhibition dedicated to the park are:

• San Francisco artist Mark Ulriksen, who has painted more than four dozen covers of the New Yorker magazine

Michael Reardon | Legion of Honor at Alta Plaza (2012)

• architectural watercolorist Michael Reardon, who has led plein-air paint-outs in the park and imagined how the park might look if San Francisco’s Legion of Honor Museum had been built there, as founder Alma Spreckels originally intended

John Payne | The Park (1959)

• John Payne, a painter who had a studio on the park in the 1950s and captured, among other subjects, the Washington-Jackson cable car line, which ran by the park for decades

Veerakeat Tongpaiboon | Uphill: Alta Plaza

• Veerakeat Tongpaiboon, who moved near the park from Thailand three decades ago and has made it one of his frequent subjects.

VIEW THE EXHIBITION ONLINE, or make an appointment to visit the gallery, which operates privately near the park.

A studio by the park

John Payne | The Park (1959)

JOHN PAYNE had no desire to settle in California until he visited San Francisco. He immediately fell under the city’s charms and uniqueness.

There was no doubt that in the 1950s it was the place to be. Lawrence Ferlinghetti had just opened City Lights bookstore in North Beach, and the free-spirited culture of the Beat generation appealed to the young painter. The hills, the Victorian houses and the liberal politics were irresistible. Best of all, his allergies disappeared like magic in the gray fog.

A new studio at Sea Ranch

Says Sandy Ostrau: “The Northern California coast has always been an important inspiration for my work. Now I’ve leased a beautiful studio space on The Sea Ranch and plan to spend more time up there working. The surrounding coast will undoubtedly continue to influence my work.”

READ MORE

Sandy Ostrau: Inspired by Sea Ranch
The Sea Ranch at SFMOMA

Wonner-Brown estate to the Crocker

William Theophilus Brown | Standing Bathers (1993)

THE CROCKER ART MUSEUM in Sacramento has received more than 1,800 works of art by Paul Wonner and William Theophilus “Bill” Brown and established the Paul Wonner and William Theophilus Brown Endowment Fund.

In accordance with the artists’ wishes, the fund will support museum projects relating to emerging artists or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning and intersex artists.

By 2023, the Crocker Art Museum will use the fund to mount an exhibition of the work of Wonner and Brown — the most comprehensive show of the artists’ body of work ever presented — and produce an accompanying catalogue.

“Paul Wonner and Bill Brown were trail blazers, both individually and as a couple,” said the museum’s associate director and chief curator, Scott A. Shields. “It is wonderful that their legacy will live on, not only through their own art, but though their forward-looking support of other artists. It is what they wanted, and everyone at the Crocker is honored to be able to realize their vision.”

Read more from the Crocker Museum

A life of art

By THOMAS REYNOLDS

He’d lived in the flat on California Street for 37 years. Suddenly late one afternoon Jim Scott realized something was wrong. He called 911 and tried to answer all the dispatcher’s questions. Finally he told her: “Look, I have to get out of here. My room is full of black smoke.”

Sparks from a welder working next door had started a fire. The squadrons of firefighters soon on the scene flooded the blaze before it reached Scott’s apartment — but only after they had bashed in his ceiling and windows, leaving his home a soggy and smoky mess.

In his book, The Al Tarik, Scott, now 96, gently unfolds the story of the three years that followed and landed him in a residential hotel on Sutter Street he describes as “a century-old San Francisco pile” that is “a refuge for those like myself who in their last years have been roughed up and tossed on the rocks and shoals.”

At first his landlord assured Scott he would be back in his apartment within a few months. He moved in temporarily with a neighbor across the alley. But as the renovation of the building languished, he needed another place to stay, and found no good options. So he moved back into his charred apartment.

“There was no heat or light, but the water was still running,” he writes. “It was much better than the Tenderloin cesspool I had fled. On my first night in what had been my old bedroom, I looked up through the blackened rafters to the shingles of the roof, which roared with a great downpour and thunder while lightning lit the plastic sheets stretched over the window spaces. Oddly, it all felt elemental and reassuring and that something positive could now happen.”

Kim Frohsin at the Crocker

Kim Frohsin and “Grasshopper Pie” at the Crocker Museum.

ON A RECENT VISIT to the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, artist Kim Frohsin rounded the corner to visit the work of old friends from the Bay Area Figurative movement and found her own “Grasshopper Pie” from the 1993. It was in good company, with an Elmer Bischoff landscape and a Manuel Neri sculpture nearby.

“Since the early 1950s, when the Bay Area artists David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and others began to return to representational motifs, California artist have pursued abstract depictions of the human figure,” the label noted. “Few have done so with the consistency of Kim Frohsin, who finds fresh inspiration in figures both nude and clothed, indoors and out. Flat and patterned, Frohsin’s figures often seem to become one with their environment, such as this woman at a bakery counter.”

Neri, Bischoff and Frohsin at the Crocker Museum.

My Minimalscapes

Kim Frohsin | Minimalscapes (1991)

FIRST PERSON | KIM FROHSIN

These four paintings on panel were created in succession during 1991, “my year of the ruler” — as in using the literal measuring tool to make marks or hold a brush load of paint against. That was my 30th year, near the beginning of my three-decade career in fine art.

I was then — as I have been in the decades since — exploring new subjects and new ways of making work. My exploration was informed by direct, concrete, personal life experience, and also by intuition, imagination and risk-taking.

These particular small works were borne during many months of making paintings on paper and panel that were as close to pure abstraction as I have ever come. In 1991, while walking in the hot Scottsdale, Arizona, sunshine, I made a simple linear drawing of a white tent. Then, back in San Francisco, this minimal drawing was the spark for a flood of work, over many months, which had as its core subject a house or tent shape. Numerous “architectonic” paintings evolved.

These four “scapes” were directly influenced by a 30th birthday gift from my grandmother: a trip to Turkey. These paintings in a muted palette, completed post-trip, stem from memories of our travels and things arid, ancient and beige.

The elements of earth, sky and water appear in these four, along with a sense of vastness and timelessness. They each are anchored by fictional objects and shapes: a floating mound as black mass, a berm of land with a steep linear road, a castle-like silhouette and wall, a banner shape like an enormous volleyball net. They seem expansive in their small-scale format. Yet they are condensed and quiet — an internal distillation of that lovely gift of travel to an ancient place.

Like all of my work, this group of four paintings are autobiographical. Until now, I’ve held on to them like entries into my private diary. In 2017, I finally decided to take them out of my youthful handmade frames and have them professionally framed. This year I am finally ready for them, for the first time, to go out into the world.