Marie Van Elder at The Great Highway Gallery

You are crawling through the desert, on hands and knees. The shimmering wave of heat off the sand beckons with the promise of pools of cool water that seem to get further away.

Cut to Lawton and 43^rd Avenue, in the Outer Sunset district of San Francisco.  There you will find a real oasis.  

The Great Highway Gallery is what drew me here, after reading about it in Sam Whiting’s Visual Arts column in the August 25 San Francisco Chronicle.

San Francisco Artist Anna Conti had a home gallery nearby until she and her husband, photographer David Sumner, moved to the booming art scene in MidTown Reno a year ago.  http://www.bigcrow.com

Great Highway is a small, narrow gallery, with two driftwood benches and a quiet dog/doorman/velvet rope guest curator.  Gallery owner John Lindsey also offers fine art printing and other art and design services.   Great Highway is currently hosting “Ente Fleurs et Mer,” still life and landscape paintings by Marie Van Elder, through September 24.

Next door to the left is Lawton Trading Post, “a community gathering space” offering pop-up events, music, and classes, today being: Summer Preserving: Jamming and Pickling Class with Chef Lisal Moran.

Photo: Fred Pompermayer

To the right of the gallery is Alex Martins Surfboard Repair, “offering high quality ding repair,” and an excellent web site for yoga and surf related links.  Standing out in front, seeing dozens of well used surfboards of many colors and sizes in vertical and horizontal racks, I thought it is an art gallery in its own right.  I pictured James Michener, sitting outside, scribbling an outline for a 600 page book detailing all the beaches where each board had played and plied its trade, plus a few hundred pages of the history and the ancestors of all the board owners. 

Exhausted from such thoughts, I moved right to see the line out the door at the Gallery recommended Andytown Coffee Roasters. One of the employees was sitting outside, eating the last piece (“employee benefit”) of a tasty looking slice of fresh bread choked into submission by a half jar of Nutella.    This little place somehow has FOUR bakers, and they turn out an array of Irish family recipe breads, plus muffins and scones.

For the month of October, The Great Highway Gallery will be the site of ArtSpan SF Open Studios Hub Exhibition, featuring Open Studios artists.

Posted by Phil Gravitt