Mediated

Last night I went to SFMOMA to see the Robert Bechtle exhibit. I’m sure I’ve seen a few of his paintings in the past, but this is the first large-scale retrospective of his work, and I was impressed. He got started painting about the time I was born, in 1962, but it seemed to me he hit his stride about 1967 or so, around the time of the painting above… at that time he starts to capture an aliveness of outdoor light, a brightness that you rarely experience in painting.

He’s known as a photorealist, and there’s certainly that aspect going on, though the exhibit shows how he uses the photo details selectively. And what’s most interesting is that I suspect most people would find the source photos to be quite poor, yet he makes beautiful paintings of them. He clearly loves the formal aspects of lines and shapes, and he’s quite masterful with handling light and shadows. His more recent paintings are more painterly in his use of underlying colors, while the subject matter continues to be largely city (San Francisco) street scenes, cars parked in front of homes.

It strikes me that these paintings capture a time and place in a way that will have lasting value should folks in the future want to know something about the Bay Area in 1965-2005.