Under the I-80, in a dim pocket of shade by a fence, there is a man. I’ve spent many summers watching him in San Francisco, but I’ve never learned his name. I wouldn’t know how to ask without breaking whatever fragile understanding exists between a passerby and a fixture. I believe he is homeless. He is also an artist.
His paintings look similar to my keen-but-untrained eye, all abstract expressionist, geometric, fever-dream-core, painted in classic Color Field style. Each one shifts a little, a yellow spilling over here, a red there, but they are all warm and alive. The colors are fierce! Nuclear saffron, a yolky ochre, sometimes an orange blaze that might set off the canvas and then the whole damn underpass alight. I’ve made a point of looking up from the numbing glow of the Calendar app on my phone when I pass by, on my way from one commitment to another.
He has a spot, carefully chosen, I think. In the mornings, if Karl the fog relents, a specific shaft of fugitive gold light hits his little encampment, filtered through the grimy latticework of the freeway supports.
Sometimes the paintings are clear and bold, other times less sure and hesitating. But they are always the same colors. I often catch him looking closely at his work. He sits on a folding stool facing the paintings, jacket zipped, cap low, a jar of half-wet brushes by him.
When the brushes are down, laid out with a surprising neatness on a piece of cardboard, there are the books. Thick and serious-looking volumes. No lurid covers or discarded magazines, to be sure. These are books that look like they demand something of the reader. His spine cracked, he’ll be lost in one, utterly oblivious of the world around him. The roar of the morning loading trucks, the distant wail of SFPD sirens, the hurried footsteps of people like me — none of it touches him.
I think about the man who paints yellow often. There’s a purity to his occupation that’s compelling and, if I’m honest, a little terrifying. He’s a splinter in the mind, this man of the underpass, a small, persistent fire burning at the edge of my meticulous and mediated world.