San Francisco Bay (Touch)

From the OED, I. 1. a.: "The action or an act of touching (with the hand, finger, or other part of the body); exercise of the faculty of feeling upon a material object. †In quot. 1340, ? a tactile organ (obs.). In quot. a1616, Hold, grasp, embrace (nonce-use)."

Late last week, I twice attempted to paint the San Francisco Ferry Building. Both attempts were hackneyed.  Dead, unfeeling, wrong. Flat. Cakes that never rose in the oven.

Ironically, by trying to paint something literally meaningful, I had made paintings that were spiritually meaningless. They put my on my back, on my bed, miserable that I could not paint. Miserable that I had conflated meaning with literality and ended up making massive muddy postcards.

I had forgotten, too, that San Francisco doesn't mean the Ferry Building to me, not really. The city is not its amenities, its architecture, or its plan. It is, rather, the Judah Street apartment building that I have never seen, but that my great grandparents called home. It is a fragment of a story of my parents' travels, made before I was born. It is the memory of a one day layover made so that I could have a drink in town with a long distant but much loved and missed best friend. San Francisco has existed for me less as a reality than as an imagined place, a construct of memories, a glimmer on the night horizon. It cannot easily be held, it has little materiality, and to try to touch a "real" San Francisco is only to wake up, and to lose that magic.

San Francisco Bay. Watercolor and Gouache on Paper, appx. 14 in x 20 in, 2016.