"Presidio #32 (Colonial)," 2025
The largest of the Presidio paintings
I’m writing this post in the airport in Frankfurt on my way to Paris. I was in my Menlo Park studio less than 48 hours ago working on this giant painting, Presidio #32. For weeks I’ve been waking up at night and thinking about this painting, sure that I could finish it before leaving on this trip. Now it can dry for 4 weeks before it gets installed at 425 Market Street in San Francisco for an exhibit of my large paintings, March 17-May 30, 2025. The show is titled “Giant Paintings from New England, California and Newfoundland”. 425 Market Street is a skyscraper and my paintings will be on view in the beautiful large lobby, 24/7.
This is a very brushy painting, a much more painterly surface than many of my recent paintings. I’m giving a talk in Meyreuil, France, next week and I’ve been looking at some of my brushy, loose landscapes from the early 1990s and that definitely has something to do with how this painting turned out. The colors are very strong if you see the painting in life. The photo is making them look casual and over saturated. I’m telling you that in person the color is creating a lot of space between the foreground of the buildings and the distant Marin headlands. I never would have predicted making so many of these Presidio paintings but the space, the shapes continue to intrigue me. Every week I get an email from someone who is at Crissy Field hiking or walking their dog and they always include a photo with the email and I see yet another possibility for the position of the buildings contrasted with the mysterious scale of the bridge. A friend in France saw one of the recent Presidio paintings in a post and being unfamiliar with Crissy field, thought I had collaged the Golden Gate Bridge into a view from the Caribbean. The color of the bridge is all over the place depending on the time of day, the position of the sun, the type of weather. Whatever red/orange I end up using for the bridge is the one that makes the painting’s space active, the one that speaks to the change from the shingles on the buildings to the distant steel structure of the enormous bridge. The space between the buildings and the bridge comes from the drawing but also the colors. It’s a space that doesn’t involve any convention of representational painting but instead a push and pull of movement into the picture plane, and simultaneous awareness of the painting’s surface. That tension is what brings me back to this motif over and over much as the motif in North Truro of roofs and chimneys to water and sky consumed me a few years ago. Both spaces, both motifs, have a tension as the depth of the scene invites you in while the composition and shapes foil a representational reading of the painting.
I have a waiting list for the new Presidio paintings. It’s best to email through my website if you want to see them as they become available. After this ad in WSJ Magazine February 15, the list has gotten mush longer.
NEWS
Click here to see all of the new notecards.
Click here to get a free ticket to my talk in Meyreuil, France, February 28, 2025.
Every time I think I've fully taken in the Marin Headlands, along comes one more breathtaking view(point.) I think the red roofs just elegantly point a new mind path. Can't wait for the Market Street show; I hope you'll be doing a talk or two there! Meanwhile, enjoy France. It's a good time to be out of the U.S. but we're fighting to keep it from disintegrating.
Mitchell, I gasped when I first glanced at this painting. It took my breath away by being at once reminiscent of your early landscapes and fresh because of your use of color. You’ve created a unique take on atmospheric perspective that makes me so curious to see this painting in person.