MAKING FACES
Artist has collected his sketches of passengers on BART into a book — are you in there?
SAN FRANCISCO >> A tumble of hair. A downward glance. That pensive expression. There’s something serene in the portraits Daly City resident Hamilton Cline sketches of unsuspecting BART riders, often on his commute into downtown San Francisco and back, or else in his time traveling throughout San Francisco and the Bay Area. Maybe it’s the fact that nearly all of them are staring at their phones. Or perhaps its the stillness he seeks when choosing his subjects. For Cline, the matter is one of practicality. “It seems silly, but after a certain point, I don’t care who I draw, I just try to find someone who isn’t going to move around a lot,” he said. And for good reason. The 15- to 20-minute commute doesn’t allow him much time for distracted passengers who fidget. It’s also why he focuses on faces, even if that means risking the eventual pang of regret for not capturing a particularly good outfit. Better to get the details right, he said, while the subjects are still present.
“I love to draw hair. I like to draw people with stuff on their heads, hats and scarves and glasses,” Cline said. “When I see an interesting nose, I have to draw it.”
Fourteen years ago, Cline gave up his job managing kitchens in Tucson, Arizona, to draw caricatures of theme park goers at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Vista. The camaraderie from the fellow artists on site was great, he said, but sales — especially the kind that requires the seller to gently poke fun at potential buyers — proved to be a grueling business. What it did do was allow Cline to practice drawing faces, and fast; artists had to churn out portraits
in five minutes or less.
When a friend offered him a job as the art director at a startup in San Francisco, Cline was happy to change course. The new job didn’t involve drawing daily, and so he’d take his sketchpad with him on BART, Muni, and everywhere else he went. Then, in late 2014, an art teacher was upgrading her phone and gave Cline her old Samsung
Note 3, which still came with a stylus.
The freedom of instant uploads was infectious, he said. No more carting around notepads and pencils or endlessly perfecting a drawing. And, the ease of undoing an erroneous stroke was appealing. Not long after, he challenged himself to draw everyday, putting call-outs on Instagram for his followers to
send in pictures. And, he’d draw on BART.
“Removing the sales aspect means it’s just fun,” he said. “Generally, I don’t even show them to the people. That way, I can draw people however I want,
whether it’s honest or goofy or exaggerated or cartooning.”
Those drawings are now the subject of his forthcoming book, “Hamilton Cline | Rapid Transit,” which he’s co-publishing with his boss, Ryan Medeiros. The book will be available on Amazon starting Monday, March 26. More details can be found at RapidTransitBook.com.