HEATHER CAPEN
Urban Light
As a landscape architect Heather Capen often worked on projects in the city that had to be integrated with its infrastructure.
“I came to be aware of the layers involved— sewage and drainage and electrical lines,” she says. “I became interested in not just the design but all the things that are involved from trees and streets to cars. I learned to appreciate the overlap of history, topography, cultures and industry that occurs in an urban environment.”
She now paints those aspects of the city. An exhibition, Urban Light: Recent Paintings by Heather Capen, is at Maybaum Gallery in San Francisco through September 3.
Included in the exhibition is Light Across San Francisco, a 3-by-6-foot panorama of the city. “Part of my method is working with a palette knife,” she explains. The palette knife allows her to make crisp edges that are prominent in her images of architecture. She uses the palette knife to streak
the paint in works where she captures the phenomena of neon lights on buildings as in Ocean Park Motel. She comments, “Sky, ocean and trees are the quickest for me to paint. It’s harder to get the perspective wrong with a tree!”
When she first started painting professionally, she painted in plein air, which forced her to work fast. She now uses photographs for reference in her brightly lit San Francisco studio. “I crop the photos in Photoshop and sometimes adjust the color and lighting. Sometimes I find scenes when I’m just going about my business and sometimes I purposefully go out to look for something,” she says. After she has decided on a composition, she scales the drawing up to a larger canvas. “Cityscapes in general are more successful at larger scale,” she explains. “They have more impact.”
Capen paints on a black canvas to make the colors richer, often beginning with a brushed underlayer to layout her composition and values before continuing with her palette knife.
“My paintings,” she says, “are a reflection on the underlying beauty of the places we see, and often don’t see, in our world.”