It was an unusual heat wave with temps in the upper 90s when I rolled down Clay street in San Francisco's Chinatown a few years ago and caught this scene. The signs, facades, pedestrians and vehicles all the way down to a snippet of the view clear across the bay to Oakland were a dizzying challenge to paint, and it took me nearly 8 months of full time work to get it finished. Happily, I've learned to pick up the pace a bit these days, but during all that time I got curious about the Chinese lettering...how would my attempts to paint the signage be affected by my lack of knowledge about how the characters should look ? If I saw a highly representational painting by an artist who wasn't a native english writer with lots of signs and text, and there were even relatively small errors in spacing, letter proportions and forms, they would disrupt my appreciation of the painting. I didn't want to be guilty of the same thing in reverse, so I sought out help from a young Chinese graduate student I happened to meet at a maritime meeting to have a look at the painting in progress.
He came to my studio and brought a friend with him, and they both agreed that I was wise to have asked the question. When students first learn to write Chinese characters, they are taught that the order in which the strokes are made govern the legibility of the characters and form the habits which become memories of how to write them. There are many dialects of Chinese, and the same characters are used in all of them and also in some other Asian languages. Many cannot understand the differences across the spoken dialects and languages, but often can read or write at least the primary core characters.
I've also tried to practice my few phrases of spoken Chinese, mostly related to ordering food and pronouncing names, which frequently leads to amused looks and sometimes the intended result. I've had to seek out help once again as I work on my latest Chinatown painting, the Manhattan night scene featured in my last post, Lafayette & Canal. One phrase of four characters repeated in this painting both vertically and horizontally on the sign above and the neon in the window of the New Hon Wong restaurant at 244 Canal street can be translated as: Famous Roast Meat
(Cantonese Style).
Another great investigation borne of the curiosity about what I was painting in the SF piece invloved finding a supervisor at MUNI to explain all the parts of the overhead wiring system for the buses and streetcars and their vernacular names. This lead to an invitation to bring the completed painting to the maintenance shops where they had a complete replica of a segment of the system installed in the building for training the crews. Everyone got a big kick out of seeing the painting and checking out the details.
Both of these paintings have turned out to be records of particular moments in time, since the signage and buildings are constantly evolving as businesses change and development marches onward. Stockton & Clay, S.F. can currently be seen at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco and Lafayette & Canal will be joining it upon completion this summer.
My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram