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San Francisco Market Street ca1941

This is the finished watercolor. It has been properly scanned and lit on a high resolution flat bed scanner. This was Market Street in 1941 just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. I created it with a single frame from a talented home movie cinematographer by the name of John H Summers and more than 140 photographs from the San Francisco Public Library and my home movies from a trip we took to California in 1957. It is not the way it actually was, but rather the way my mind's eye perceived and remembered it. The proportions in the painting are completely different than any image resource I used. I have often stated in lectures and demonstrations something I realized in 1984. That is the mind perfects what the eye sees. The most notable difference from any of my photo resources that I used is that the Ferry Terminal Tower is about two stories higher than in any of the resource photos I used. The painting is proportioned as if it were viewed through a telephoto lens. This gives the scene a friendlier more inviting quality than if it were seen through a wide angle lens. A wide angle lens will obscure detail and the reduces the detail the brain receives making it much more difficult for the viewer to orient himself and get a sense of place. What the observer sees in this painting is the image that would be remembered had he or she stood at the vantage point, walked away from the scene and thought back to that observed moment in time in the mind's eye. I accomplished this by doing a free hand sketch and drew it as I unraveled the elements of this immensely complex scene and saw it develop as a natural extension of my observations of all the various images I used of San Francisco's Market Street as it looked in 1941, right down to the movies playing at the theaters. For those of you who expressed an interest in seeing the completed painting, I hope it was worth the wait.

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Anonymous Guest 19 Apr 2014

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Anonymous Guest 28 Feb 2014

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Anonymous Guest 08 Jan 2014

eLqXoC wow, awesome post.Really thank you! Much obliged.

Anonymous Guest 01 Oct 2013

Hello! My name is Olga. I from Moscow (Russia). I admire your works! ! ! In our family archive there is a photo which was identified thanks to your picture. Such feeling develops that mine the great-grandmother and the great-grandfather go down the street while you draw it. Even the signs "esquire" and "telenews" hangs on the same place! I will be grateful for any answer. Yours faithfully, Olga Pismennya (Moscow) For communication [email protected]

Anonymous Guest 01 Oct 2013

Hello! My name is Olga. I from Moscow (Russia). I admire your works! ! ! In our family archive there is a photo which was identified thanks to your picture. Such feeling develops that mine the great-grandmother and the great-grandfather go down the street while you draw it. Even the signs "esquire" and "telenews" hangs on the same place! I will be grateful for any answer. Yours faithfully, Olga Pismennya (Moscow) For communication [email protected]