I❤️SF. It’s true, I do. I lived there and in it’s lovely sister, Marin County for many years. But what I love maybe even more is that here I am living in southern Oregon, a different kind of lovely, a lifestyle lovely, and I am drawing on memories, instincts and a knowing from my internal scrapbook for these new paintings that will celebrate San Francisco and I don’t feel a longing to live there, but a sweetness that all the bread crumbs in life really do lead you home.
My friends are opening a new gift store, a third location for EizabethW, at SFO, Terminal 2, opening April 1st and that ain’t no April Fools joke! Although life is funny. The entire time I lived there I doubt I painted one single Golden Gate Bridge, rarely rode a trolley and, full disclosure, baseball is not my thing. (True story: I once brought a book to a game. And read it.) But that’s the way of life in any iconic city, you rarely celebrate the tourist attractions but they absorb into your skin, become the backdrop for your daily life.
So today I paint pink bikes and billboards with San Francisco ephemera and think about the hundreds of times I crossed the bridge in the morning with my Buckeye Roadhouse drive-thru coffee in the console, gauging the day by the way the fog came in, how many boats were in the bay, how hard the rain was coming down and always, even on the best days, there was a little piece of me that thought, wouldn’t it be lovely to be at home, painting writing cooking creating, owning a business, writing a book, living a more simple, less stressful life. Maybe one day.
Little did I know…xo